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Dressing or Stuffing for Fowls

A bread-based stuffing seasoned with pepper, salt, savory, sage, butter, and optional egg, sausage, or onion for fowl.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Summer savory and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 237 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Dressing or Stuffing for Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Cut the brown crust from stale bread until you have enough to equal the inside of a pound loaf.

  2. Place the bread in a dish and pour ½ cup of tepid water over it; let it soak for one minute.

  3. Squeeze the soaked bread hard and dry with both hands, placing it in another dish.

  4. Once all the bread is pressed dry, toss it lightly through your fingers.

Season and mix

  1. Add pepper, salt, summer savory, sage, melted butter, and the beaten egg; mix thoroughly.

  2. For turkey, you may add chopped sausage; for geese and ducks, include chopped onion.

  3. This stuffing is ready for dressing fowls, fish, or meats.

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. Summer savory + sagetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together237 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + summer savorytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together671 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  5. Summer savory + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together299 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Provides the dry structure that holds the stuffing together and absorbs the butter and seasonings.
Melted butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and keeping the stuffing tender.
Beaten egg
Binds the bread crumbs together so the stuffing holds its shape.

The step that matters

Squeezing the soaked bread dry. Bread soaked in water becomes wet and heavy; if it is not pressed dry, the extra moisture makes the stuffing soggy and slows its setting and browning.

Swap the sage

The recipe marks sage as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, bread, pepper, summer savory, butter, egg, onion):

  1. Thymefits about as well
  2. Sagethe original
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Marjoramfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, bread, pepper, summer savory, butter, egg, onion. 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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