Turkeys are indeed an American bird. Beyond indigenous, they are a seasonal staple, the subject of movies, plays, and kids craft projects across the nation. They are also a large bird, and when cooking them, the cavity for their entrails is quite large. Simply cooking them open leaves the meat dry when baked in an oven. The natural advent is to stuff the turkey with something, almost anything. My personal favourite is to stuff the bird with fruit, which I pitch later because the fruit has done its job to keep the bird moist and add some flavour.
Unfortunately, there is this an almost patriotic trend to serve something somehow edible after shoving it into the cavity of the bird carcass. In childhood, even out West, I experienced this habit of serving the actual stuffing, and I found it even worse then with a young palate. Scarred by decades of disgust, stuffing is the one dish I will always pass on at someone else's table. In some cases, I've noticed that the recipe for the stuffing is actually used and then an additional quantity is served as a casserole bake. By taxonomy, this is quite obviously an accompaniment or side dish, when in all kindness, it should be discarded as cooking waste.
Core Ingredients
* Butter
* Salt and heavy spices
* Some combination of seasoned bread, onion, apple, potato, and celery
Items are mixed together in a bowl and either fried or baked, or fried and baked. The general concept, however, is that the ingredients are cooked. Some folks who are in a hurry will simply buy pre-made stuffing where you add water and then bake it, sometimes adding celery. What is essentially going on is that the stuffing is having the moisture removed from it. When this is then put into the turkey, the moisture of the turkey is drawn into the stuffing, leaving you with moist, sometimes soggy stuffing and a dry bird when used as intended, since breads will attract and hold moisture more readily than meat. That is a particularly clever accomplishment, because the intended purpose of the stuffing has been sabotaged through ignorance or some sort of malice intended for disliked relatives.
First: Butter. This is essentially what you are eating. I've encountered recipes where a "stick" of it is used, followed by more butter to grease the baking dish, and even more butter on the top. And if the tertiary ingredients are somehow fried ahead of time, butter or perhaps oil are used again. This dish is between one fifth and one third butter. If you want that flavour for the turkey, get a turkey fryer and use butter. With the remnants from frying, you could safely use it to grease your frying pans until the snow melts off in the Spring.
Second: Salt and heavy spices. While seasoning a turkey with salt and spices makes a lot of sense, it belongs mostly on the surface of the turkey, not as a dish which would somehow be eaten later. This much salt and spice is usually reserved for pickling meat, like corned beef, and the brine is then discarded and not put on festive stoneware. I wonder if anyone has ever corned a turkey. As I've mentioned in previous posts, salt is used as an emetic. In Brazilian cooking, salt coating the outside will preserve the moisture of the meat, but on the inside, it isn't clear what it is doing. The heavy spices, again, suitable for pickling, not serving in a dish. Spice levels enough to season a turkey as a discarded stuffing and yet be edible afterwards are inconceivable. This has given rise to the notion that stuffing isn't really an accompaniment to turkey, but more of a condiment. I think the best use of stuffing with too much salt is to melt the ice on a slippery sidewalk.
Third: Some combination of seasoned bread, onion, apple, potato, and celery. By themselves, the raw ingredients can be quite enjoyable, however this mixture is often bad news. Seasoned breads (muffins, corn bread, croutons), however, collide with the texture of the fruit or vegetables in a tragic accident on the road to your stomach. Again, bread is meant to hold or draw moisture. It will draw moisture out of the fruit and vegetables, then the turkey. If the bread is saturated, it will then turn soggy. Some culinary criminals will recognize this and then bake the soggy stuffing afterwards. In breads that contain gluten, this produces a hard glaze, especially in the presence of all that butter. Perhaps hard enough to walk on, stuffing could be used to fill cracks in your sidewalk.
With so much salt and butter, it is no wonder that family members at risk in their health will die over the holidays. Combined with relational stress, arguments about the stuffing being too dry (and valiant spouses eating it to rally in defense, despite their better judgement of health), stuffing is among the least safe substances produced in a kitchen and should be labelled as a desiccant and not fit for consumption. My advice for those who believe an accompaniment should have the flavour of the turkey is to cook the turkey in a pan and make gravy from the juices, but what is stuffed in the turkey should be tossed. One option instead of stuffing would be polenta cooked with vegetables.
Potluck Crime: Murder, murder most fowl.
