Home › Poultry › Stuffing for the Turkey
Stuffing for the Turkey
Use bread at least two days old, cut off the crust, dip in hot water, spread the bread with butter, rub fine, break the crumb as finely as possible, and to each quart allow one scant teaspoonful of salt, one-third of a teaspoonful pepper, and sage and thyme, and one-third of a cupful of melted butter. For a good sized turkey two quarts are needed. To vary the flavor a part of the bread may be omitted and its place supplied by an equal quantity of raw oysters, sausage meat or boiled or roasted chestnuts.
A plain bread stuffing measured by volume of crumbs rather than by weight, with the seasoning left largely to the cook's judgment. Two points need attention: the herb quantities are unstated, and the safe internal temperature of stuffing cooked inside a bird is not.
- Measure the crumbs, not the loafA quart of soft crumbs is four cups loosely packed; the weight varies a good deal with how finely the crumb is broken, somewhere in the range of 6-8 oz of two-day-old bread. Two quarts for a large turkey therefore means the better part of a loaf, crusts removed.
- The water dipDipping the crumb in hot water and rubbing it fine is the hinge of the method: it gives a soft, even paste-like crumb rather than dry shreds. Use hot water sparingly and squeeze the bread out, or the stuffing turns sodden and heavy.
- Herbs left unmeasured"Sage and thyme" is given without amount. For each quart of crumbs, a teaspoon of dried sage and half a teaspoon of dried thyme is in keeping with the salt and pepper given here; sage dominates quickly, so add and taste.
- ButterOne-third cup melted butter per quart of crumbs, so two-thirds of a cup for a large turkey, plus whatever is spread on the bread beforehand. That is a rich stuffing by modern habit and can be cut back without harm.
- Temperature inside the birdStuffing packed into a turkey must reach 165F on a thermometer pushed into the centre of the cavity, which usually means the breast overshoots. Baking the stuffing in a separate dish avoids the problem entirely.
- The oyster and sausage variationsBoth go in raw and depend wholly on the bird's cooking to bring them to a safe temperature, so they raise the stakes on the point above. Sausage-meat stuffing in particular is safer baked in a dish where the whole mass can be checked.
- ChestnutsBoiled or roasted chestnuts here mean peeled sweet chestnuts. About 1 lb in the shell yields roughly 2 cups of nutmeat; use whatever volume replaces the bread you have left out, as the recipe directs. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts do the same work.
- YieldTwo quarts is about what a bird of 10-12 lb will take; the recipe itself only says 'a good sized turkey'. Any surplus can be baked separately in a buttered dish, covered for most of the time, until the centre reaches 165F.
Bread stuffing built on stale crumb, butter, sage and thyme was a common American roast-poultry filling of the nineteenth century. Oysters, sausage meat and chestnuts were all in general use as variations: oysters were plentiful on the Atlantic seaboard and were shipped inland by rail, and chestnuts came from the American chestnut, a forest tree later destroyed by blight in the early twentieth century. The instruction to use bread 'at least two days old' reflects a kitchen where bread was baked at home in batches and staling was a schedule rather than an accident.