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To Prepare Crumbs for Stuffing
Remove the crust from a loaf of stale bread, break the loaf in the middle and rub the jagged or rough edges against each other until the bread is rubbed into quite fine crumbs; season to taste and moisten lightly with melted butter, minced parsley, onion, sage, sweet marjoram, thyme, oysters or chestnuts, all are good; season highly with pepper and salt.
This is the base for every poultry stuffing in the book rather than a finished dish, and the whole method hinges on the bread being dry enough to crumble rather than smear.
- The bread matters more than the techniqueA day- or two-day-old loaf, left uncovered overnight, suits the method. Modern sandwich bread is too soft and damp to rub into crumbs; if that is what you have, tear it and dry it in a 300F oven for 15-20 minutes first.
- Rubbing versus a food processorRubbing the torn halves together gives irregular, fluffy crumbs that absorb butter without turning pasty. A processor works but pulse it and stop early -- fine, sandy crumbs make a dense, gummy stuffing.
- QuantityA one-pound loaf, crusts off, yields roughly 6 to 7 cups of loose crumbs, which is about right for a 10-12 lb turkey or two roasting chickens.
- "Moisten lightly"Around 4 to 6 tablespoons of melted butter per loaf. The crumbs should clump when squeezed and fall apart again; anything wetter steams into pudding inside the bird.
- Sweet marjoramSimply marjoram as sold today. Sage, thyme and marjoram together suit the recipe, which gives no proportions. The recipe does not say whether the onion is cooked; softening it in the butter first is kinder to modern palates.
- Oysters or chestnutsShucked oysters should be drained and left whole; chopping them and cooking them long gives the rubbery texture that put people off oyster stuffing. Chestnuts must be cooked and peeled before they go in, and peeled cooked vacuum-packed chestnuts are a straight substitute.
- Cooking itStuffing packed inside a bird must reach 165F at the center, which usually means the breast overcooks. Baking it in a buttered dish for 30-40 minutes at 350F, moistened with a little stock, is the safer and better-tasting route.
Bread stuffing was for centuries the cheapest way to stretch a roast and to catch the fat and juices that would otherwise be lost, which is why cookbooks of this era treat crumbs as a staple preparation with its own heading rather than as part of any single recipe. The rubbing method is simply a way of handling a whole stale loaf: stale bread was a daily by-product, not something you had to plan for, and every household had a use for it. The oysters would have raised no eyebrows -- oyster stuffing was standard in British as well as American cookery through the nineteenth century, and oysters were still abundant and cheap enough to be a bulking agent, shipped inland by rail in barrels and sold by the quart, ordinary holiday fare rather than a luxury. Chestnuts, offered here as the alternative, were equally cheap before the blight of the early twentieth century destroyed the American chestnut across its range.