Stuffing, Set Free From Turkey (Published 2012) (2024)

WHY do we cook stuffing only once a year? On any given weekend, a reasonably ambitious cook might roast a bird, mash some potatoes and bake a pie. But stuffing — beloved whether it is sausage or meatless, corn bread or sourdough, inside the bird or out — is cordoned off into a Thanksgiving-only category.

This is plain wrong, because bread stuffing is one of the most forgiving, fragrant and inspiring dishes imaginable. When made from scratch and seasoned right, it is rich, moist and savory, shot through with different textures and flavors that give cooks plenty of room to play. That basic amalgamation of starch, fat and aromatics is indisputably delicious.

And not so long ago, it was a staple on the American table.

“Every Friday night, of course, roast chicken with bread stuffing,” said Sheila Brass, 75, who grew up in Winthrop, Mass. Ms. Brass, a culinary historian, said her mother always had leftover bread in a tin container on top of the refrigerator, drying out in preparation for the Sabbath meal. Rendered chicken fat, grated onions, plenty of black pepper and an egg were added to bind and season the bread into a kind of savory bread pudding. “She would use Vienna rolls, bulkie rolls, cholly,” Ms. Brass said, in her blend of strong New England and slight Yiddish accents.

Bread stuffing in America originates on the British side of our culinary family; in England, it is inexorably seasoned with onion and sage and served at Sunday dinner. The dish lingered in our cooking tradition as a thrifty way to extract every savory bit of bird and bread.

But at some point in the 1970s, around the time low-carb diets and Mediterranean cooking came into vogue, a rich side dish of bread that had spent hours absorbing meat juices and fat was no longer so appealing.

Also, the Agriculture Department has become increasingly discouraging about stuffing. The spread of salmonella and other bacteria in the food supply has pushed the agency’s minimum temperature for safely cooked poultry to 165 degrees. (The magic number for meat is 145 degrees.) For a turkey larger than about 10 pounds, once the stuffing at the center of the bird hits 165 degrees, the bird itself is as dry as jerky.