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Veal and Lamb
Soak half a pound of bread in tepid water, then squeeze it dry; put two ounces of butter into a stew pan, and when hot, a half of a very small onion minced slightly; then add the bread, with a half teaspoonful of powdered thyme , half teaspoonful of powdered sage, pepper, salt, and a gill of stock; stir it over the fire until it leaves the bottom and sides, then mix in one egg. The chestnut stuffing is made by adding chestnuts to the ordinary stuffing; they are put on the fire in a saucepan to burst the skins, they are then boiled in very salted water or stock; some are also put into the sauce. For oyster dressing or stuffing add plenty of whole oysters (not chopped) to the ordinary turkey bread stuffing; it should be well seasoned, or the oysters will taste insipid.
A bread stuffing given in the plain nineteenth-century manner, with two variations tacked on. The base is cooked in the pan before it ever goes near the bird, which is the detail that makes it work.
- The hinge: cook the panada dryThe mixture is stirred over heat until it "leaves the bottom and sides" — that is, until it pulls away in a mass like choux paste. Stop short of that and the stuffing is sodden; carry it past and the egg has nothing to bind. Cool it a few minutes before beating the egg in, or you will scramble it.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. With bread already soaked and wrung out, you may not need all of it — add it in two stages and judge by the paste.
- Half a pound of breadWeight, not volume: about eight ounces of stale white bread, crusts on or off as you like, which is roughly six thick slices. The recipe gives no yield; soaked and squeezed, the quantity is a modest one.
- Powdered thyme and sageGround dried herbs, not the leaf form sold today. Ground sage is stronger by volume than rubbed sage; if using rubbed, you will need rather more, on the order of double.
- ChestnutsScore each shell with an X before heating so it bursts cleanly, then peel while hot — the inner brown skin will not come away once cold. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts skip both steps. Simmer in stock until tender, about 20 minutes, then break roughly rather than chopping fine.
- Oysters, and the warning attachedThe instruction to season well is the useful part: oysters throw liquor into the bread and dilute everything around them. Keep them whole, fold them in last, and expect the stuffing to loosen as they cook.
- Do not stuff the birdSafer to bake the dressing in a buttered dish rather than in the cavity: stuffing packed inside a turkey often reaches a safe 165F only once the breast is overcooked, and the oyster version, with raw shellfish in the mix, makes that more pressing. The book gives no oven; a moderate oven, covered and then uncovered to brown, is a modern adaptation.
Bread stuffing built on a squeezed-out panada, enriched with butter and bound with egg, is the standard English and American forcemeat of the period. Chestnut stuffing came into American cookbooks from French and English practice, where the chestnut was a cheap staple long before it was a holiday luxury; the blight that destroyed the American chestnut did not begin its sweep until after 1904 — the nuts sold today are almost all European or Asian. Oyster dressing reflects the other half of the nineteenth-century larder: oysters were plentiful and cheap on both coasts and shipped inland by rail in barrels, which is why they turn up in stuffings, sauces and soups in books like this one with no suggestion that they were anything special.