For Stuffing
1 quart fine breadcrumbs 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1½ teaspoonfuls salt 2 tablespoonfuls chopped onion 1 lemon 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley 1/4 teaspoonful powdered thyme 1/4 teaspoonful white pepper 1 egg Salt pork 1 cupful country sausage A little warm water 1 turkey Mix sausage with breadcrumbs, add egg well beaten, Crisco, seasonings, grated rind and strained juice of lemon, and moisten with a little hot water. Be careful not to make stuffing too moist. See that turkey is well plucked, singed and wiped; fold over pinions, and pass skewer through them, thick part of legs and body, catching leg and pining it on other side; now secure bottom part of leg, which should have feet cut off half way to first joint, fill breast of bird with stuffing and skewer down skin. Place 2 strips salt pork in bottom of roasting pan, lay in turkey and place several strips salt pork over breast and sprinkle lightly with flour. Roast in hot oven, allowing fifteen minutes to the pound. Baste occasionally with melted Crisco. Serve hot decorated with cooked onions, celery tips, cranberries, and parsley.
A standard bread-and-sausage turkey stuffing from Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook, written when the bird arrived from the butcher with its feet still on. The method is sound; the temperatures and the raw-sausage question need attention.
- The hinge: raw sausage inside the birdThe stuffing contains uncooked bulk pork sausage and raw egg, and it goes into a cold bird. The centre of the stuffing must register 165F on an instant-read thermometer, not just the thigh meat. Cooks who would rather not chase that number should brown the sausage first, or bake the stuffing in a separate dish.
- "Hot oven" and fifteen minutes to the poundA hot oven in 1913 is usually reckoned at roughly 400-450F. Modern practice roasts a whole turkey at 325-350F, and 15 minutes per pound at high heat risks scorching the salt pork and drying the breast before a stuffed bird is safe through. Go by thermometer: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone.
- CriscoStill sold, but reformulated in the mid-2000s to cut trans fats, so it behaves somewhat differently from the 1913 product. In the stuffing it is simply fat and moisture; butter or rendered bacon fat works. For basting, melted butter browns better than shortening.
- Country sausageFresh bulk pork sausage, usually seasoned with sage and black pepper. Any uncased breakfast sausage stands in. Note that it brings its own salt; the recipe adds only half a teaspoon more.
- Salt porkCured fatback, used here as barding rather than seasoning. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon or pancetta gives the same result; smoked bacon will flavour the whole bird.
- TrussingPinions are the wing tips, folded back under the bird. Modern turkeys come plucked, singed and footless, so most of the paragraph on skewering can be replaced by tucking the wings and tying the legs with butcher's twine.
- Breast cavity onlyThe recipe fills the neck end and skewers the skin down, leaving the body cavity empty. That is worth keeping: less packed stuffing means heat reaches the centre faster.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, two years after the company introduced Crisco as the first widely marketed hydrogenated cottonseed shortening. The book's purpose was to show American cooks that a vegetable fat could do everything lard and butter did, which is why Crisco turns up throughout the book, including in a bread stuffing that already has sausage in it. The stuffing itself is thoroughly conventional for the period: crumbs, sausage meat, lemon rind and juice, thyme and parsley, bound with egg. Lemon in poultry forcemeat is an inheritance from English cookery, where it is generally said to have been common by the eighteenth century, often explained as a counter to the richness of pork fat. The instruction to cut the feet off halfway to the first joint is a reminder that a turkey then came from a butcher or a farmyard, more or less intact, rather than shrink-wrapped.