Stymied by stuffing
Stuffing-fest was an unqualified success.
I’ve filled more than a few of these column inches over the years and months with thoughts about my mom’s famous stuffing – a crumby, fried dish unlike any other Thanksgiving stuffing I’ve ever had. It was the creation of my grandfather, who apparently never wrote down the recipe. Nor did we ever ask our mom to do so. She passed away last July not intestate, as she did leave a will, but “in-feast-state,” the word I made up just now to define the loss suffered when the children never really get a beloved family recipe before it’s too late.
We had the gist of it, though, because our dad had assisted in the pre-Thanksgiving and pre-Christmas (and even pre-Easter) stuffing preparation for all those 68 years. And so, last Wednesday my younger sister, our dad and I tied on the aprons and set to work. There would be people counting on us to put that stuffing on the table.
Step one: Lay the slices of white bread out on the counter to dry overnight. Because of doing this step too early, or perhaps from the extra-dry air in the house, the bread arrived at the time to cook not just a bit dry but crumbly and hard as doggie biscuits. We improvised, placing damp towels over the bread to moisturize it a bit.
Meanwhile, out-of-town relatives also were making the stuffing for the first time. They forgot to leave the bread out and faced the opposite problem: the bread was too soft and was getting gummed-up in the meat grinder.
“Your mom would be horrified,” they told me over the phone. “But we dried the bread with a hair dryer.” I told them, whatever works.
Back in our kitchen, our dad was doing the manual grinding while sister pushed the bread and then the celery and onions through the blades. On my video you see a very tall and strong great-grandfather cranking that handle like a champ; you also hear some stuffing squabbling (let’s call it squaffling) as they try to get the timing right. Someone was stuffing the stuffing ingredients into the grinder too quickly.
I was the fry cook, standing at the stove, putting batches of the bread, celery and onion mixture in a pan with butter and then frying it to the right level of golden brown. I wasn’t sure of the correct ratio of poultry seasoning to sage, so I titrated it until it tasted the same as I remembered. Then I added the chopped walnuts. From start to clean-up, it took us about three hours to make a couple gallons of stuffing.
We were proud to put the bowl of stuffing on the table the next day. Everyone gobbled it. But was it exactly the same as our mom’s?
“Exactly the same,” was the general consensus, and “very yummy.”
Me, I think it needed salt or more sage or something, but we got pretty darn close. Not bad for the first try.
The effort was instructive. Making that stuffing is a lot of work – physical work. It’s remarkable that our mom (with dad at her side) did that for us all those years. I like to think that she was lurking somewhere in the kitchen last week while we worked.
“More sage. Slow down,” she might say. “Wish I could be there to help.”
We all wished that.