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Stuffing for Birds

A savory stuffing made from stale bread crumbs, butter, onion, herbs, spices, and optional celery or oysters, used for birds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Stuffing for Birds

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Crumb the stale bread finely and sprinkle a little water on it without soaking.

  2. Melt the butter in a pan and fry the onion, parsley, cloves, allspice, mace, black pepper, and celery seed for 15 minutes.

  3. Skim out the spices and pour the flavored butter over the bread crumbs.

Season and finish

  1. Add salt and pepper to taste.

  2. For added flavor, mix in chopped raw celery or place small oysters in each quail.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Parsley + allspicetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Allspice + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,422 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Clove + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Form the bulk of the stuffing and absorb the seasoned butter and moisture.
Butter
Carries the flavor of the fried spices and onion through the crumbs and adds richness.
Onion
Frying in butter builds a savory, sweet base flavor for the stuffing.
Celery seed
Adds a warm, aromatic celery flavor to the stuffing.

The step that matters

Frying the spices in butter. Cooking the spices gently in fat releases their aromatic oils into the butter. Skimming out the solids before pouring keeps the stuffing from tasting gritty or overly bitter.

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, onion, parsley, clove, allspice, mace):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, onion, parsley, clove, allspice, mace. 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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