1 lb Bread
1 White onion,
-chopped fine
1 ts Salt
Pepper, freshly ground
1/2 ts Sage
1/2 ts Thyme
1/4 lb Butter, melted
On the weekend before Thanksgiving, set aside some homemade bread, to
dry out. Leave it unwrapped so that it will dry thoroughly.
Thanksgiving morning, cut the bread into thick slices and remove the
crust from each slice. Dip each slice into cold water, and wring out
carefully. After squeezing each slice dry, crumble it into a large
bowl by rubbing between your hands.
Add salt, pepper, sage, thyme and chopped onion to the bowl, and stir
gently. Pour on the melted butter and toss like a salad.
NOTES:
* A stuffing recipe from the founder of Pepperidge Farm Margaret
Rudkin founded the Pepperidge Farm bakery as a health-food venture in
1937 because one of her children was allergic to white bread. Her
family lived on a farm in Connecticut that had a lot of pretty
sorghum trees that the locals called « pepperidge trees, » hence the
name. Rudkin’s pediatrician asked to buy loaves of her whole-grain
bread for other children with white-flour allergies, and so the
business was started. If you look in cookbooks published in that era,
they mostly say that it is impossible to make bread from whole grains
because the flour was too coarse and the bread would not hold
together. In its time, this was a very risky venture.
In 1963, Margaret Rudkin published a cookbook with all of her family
recipes. It’s called « The Margaret Rudkin Pepperidge Farm Cookbook, »
(Atheneum Press). It is a rare book, and has been out of print for 20
years. In 1965 Grosset and Dunlap republished it with much wider
distribution, but that book is also out of print.
In general I have found that the recipes in this book are nearly
identical to the products sold by the Pepperidge Farm bakery, and
it’s a lot of fun to make your own. Here is her recipe for
Thanksgiving turkey stuffing.
* Rudkin’s notes say « taste and sniff as you go, because you might
like more sage or thyme. »
: Difficulty: easy.
: Time: 4 days drying bread, 10 minutes preparation.
: Precision: no need to measure.
: Brian Reid
: DEC Western Research Laboratory, Palo Alto, California, USA
: reid@decwrl.DEC.COM -or-
{ihnp4,ucbvax,decvax,sun,pyramid}!decwrl!reid
:
Yields
8 servings