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Stuffing for Fowls

A savory stuffing made with stale bread crumbs, onion, butter, egg, and boiled corn, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Stuffing for Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the bread stuffing

  1. Season stale bread crumbs with chopped onion, salt, and pepper.

  2. Add melted butter to moisten the mixture.

  3. Soak stale bread in ½ pint of cold water.

  4. Cook chopped onion in 1 tablespoon of butter until soft.

  5. Squeeze out excess water from the bread crumbs and mix in the cooked onion and butter.

  6. Cook for a few minutes, then remove from heat and stir in the beaten egg.

Stuff and serve

  1. Stuff the chicken or turkey with boiled corn seasoned with butter, pepper, and salt.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Onion + chickentop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Pepper + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Chicken + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,666 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Stale bread crumbs
Provide the bulk and body of the stuffing, soaking up moisture and fat.
Egg
Sets when heated, binding the crumbs together into a cohesive stuffing.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and keeping the crumbs moist.
Onion
Softened in butter, it adds sweetness and savoury aroma to the stuffing.
Chicken fat
Adds savoury poultry flavour and moisture from the cooking liquor.

The step that matters

Stirring in the beaten egg off the heat. Egg proteins set when heated, so adding egg to a very hot mixture can scramble it into lumps. Removing the pan from heat first lets the egg bind the crumbs evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, pepper, butter, egg, chicken, corn):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pepper, butter, egg, chicken, corn. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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