Home › Poultry › Dressing for Turkey
Dressing for Turkey
Slice fine enough stale bread to stuff the turkey, butter each slice and chop fine, moisten with milk, salt and pepper to taste, sage; oysters or onions chopped fine may be added, if preferred.
A loose, old-fashioned bread dressing written for a cook who already knew what stuffing should feel like. The quantities are left entirely to judgement, so the notes below fill in the numbers.
- QuantityA 12-14 lb turkey takes roughly 8-10 cups of bread cubes, which is about a 1 lb loaf. Half goes in the bird, half in a dish alongside, if you want enough to serve.
- "Stale bread"This means dry, firm, day-or-two-old bread, not moldy. Modern sandwich loaves are too soft and too sweet; use a plain white or country loaf, cubed and left out overnight or dried 15 minutes in a 300F oven.
- Butter each sliceButtering the slices before chopping distributes the fat evenly through the crumb, which may help it take up milk without turning pasty. Figure 4-6 tablespoons of butter per pound of bread. Softened butter spreads far more easily than cold.
- Moisten with milkAdd the milk a few tablespoons at a time until the mixture holds together when squeezed but is not wet. Start with about 3/4 cup per pound of bread. Overmoistened dressing steams into a dense pudding inside the bird.
- SageMost likely dried rubbed sage, though the recipe says only 'sage.' Use 1 to 2 teaspoons per pound of bread; sage is assertive, and nineteenth-century seasoning was often heavier than modern palates like. Fresh sage, finely minced, needs about triple the volume.
- Oysters or onionsIf using oysters, allow about a cup of shucked oysters, drained and roughly chopped, and cut back the milk to compensate for their liquor. Raw onion added straight in stays crunchy; sweat it in butter first for a few minutes.
- Temperature is the hingeStuffing packed inside a bird must reach 165F at the center of the dressing, not just in the thigh. Pack it loosely, check it with a thermometer, and if the turkey is done before the stuffing is, spoon the dressing into a dish and finish it in the oven. Stuff the bird just before it goes in, never the night before.
- Baked separatelyDressing baked in a dish wants about 350F for 35-45 minutes, covered for the first half, uncovered after to brown the top. Moisten it with a little stock or pan drippings, since it has no bird juices to draw on.
Bread dressing built on buttered, crumbled stale bread with sage runs through much of the American turkey tradition and appears in many household manuals from the nineteenth century onward. Sage's pairing with poultry and pork is old English usage carried across the Atlantic, and by the later nineteenth century sage was common enough in poultry stuffing that a recipe could simply write "sage" and expect to be understood. The oyster variation reflects how cheap and widely shipped oysters had become: barrels of them moved inland by rail and ice, and oyster dressing was familiar well away from the coast. The recipe's vagueness is characteristic of its moment. Turkeys came in whatever size was available, so telling a cook to slice "enough stale bread to stuff the turkey" was more useful than a fixed measure, and the reader was assumed to know by hand and eye when the mixture was right.