Grandma Hindes’s Simple Stuffing

This is another recipe of my Grandma Hindes. I am still amazed today when I think about how talented a cook she was. She never used a cookbook in her life, and I don’t think she ever even wrote her recipes down. When my mother and father got married, and my mother started to cook, she wanted to make many her mother’s recipes. This was complicated by the fact that my grandmother only cooked from her head, not from a recipe. So my mother had conversations with my grandmother where she tried to pin her down and make my grandmother give her exact quantities of the ingredients that she used. This was one of my absolute favorite recipes of my grandmother’s that my mother made. For some reason, I loved watching my mother make this particular recipe. I loved the sounds and the smells as she put the ingredients together. My mother and I used to love tasting the uncooked stuffing to check the seasoning. We weren’t worried about salmonella back then. This was the only recipe my mother ever used for stuffing a turkey. It is such a delicious, simple recipe for stuffing, and very different from most stuffing recipes today. But when a holiday comes around, everybody wants to make sure in advance that I’m still making this stuffing. Please, try it. Some of the best tasting things in life are the simplest!

For a 12-15 pound turkey:

• 10 seeded hard rolls
• 8 extra large eggs
• about 1/2 cup corn, canola, or light olive oil
• Kosher salt and lots of pepper to taste

Soak a few rolls in warm water. When they have softened, put them in your hands one at a time and squeeze the water out of them. Then with your hands, tear the rolls up into bite sized pieces and place in large mixing bowl. Continue this until you are done with all of the rolls. Then in a separate bowl, mix eggs with a fork. Pour them into the rolls, and mix gently with a rubber spatula. Add the oil, and mix again. Add salt to taste, somewhere around 2 teaspoons, and your pepper, somewhere around 1/2 teaspoon. I like it really peppery. At this point you can also use fresh ground pepper, but you’ll need quite a few grinds. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate until you are ready to cook your turkey.

Now, before I put the stuffing in the cavity, I make a paste up of oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder, and lots of paprika. I shmear this on the outside of the turkey, and then all over the inside cavity. Then, I put the stuffing in. These seasonings give the stuffing lots of extra flavor.

When you stuff the turkey, do not try to pack it in tightly. Just put it in, but don’t worry if you can’t fit every last bit of the stuffing in. If you have some left over, put it in a small casserole dish, sprinkle the top of the stuffing mixture in the dish nicely with paprika, and bake it for about 45 minutes. I always make extra, because the quantity in the cavity is never enough anyway.