Skip to main content
Main

Stuffing for Fowls

A bread-based stuffing for fowls made with stale bread crumbs, onion, butter, egg, and corn.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Prepare the bread

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

  2. Add melted butter to moisten the mixture.

  3. Soak stale bread crumbs in cold water for 10 minutes.

Make the stuffing

  1. Cook chopped onion in 2 tablespoons of butter until soft.

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

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

Stuff the bird

  1. Stuff the chicken or turkey with the seasoned corn and moisten with chicken fat.

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
Form the bulk of the stuffing and absorb moisture and flavour.
Egg
Binds the stuffing so it holds together when cooked.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps moisten the mixture.
Onion
Adds aroma and savoury flavour when softened in butter.
Chicken fat
Moistens the stuffing and adds savoury flavour from the cooking liquor.

The step that matters

Squeezing out the excess water from the bread crumbs. Bread soaked in water holds much more liquid than it needs. If the excess is not squeezed out, the stuffing turns soggy and loose and will not hold its shape or brown properly.

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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesChicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipes