"No one can even really answer the question: "What is stuffing?" You get a million different answers. A quick Google search exposes a certain desperation to make stuffing more interesting: Cornbread Stuffing Southern Style; Milk Cracker Stuffing; Awesome Sausage, Apple and Cranberry Stuffing; and, of course, something called Stuffing of Champions. I am not impressed.
A Wikipedia entry gets straight to the heart of the problem for me. "It is not known when stuffings were first used," the entry reads. "The earliest documentary evidence is the Roman cookbook Apicius, which contains recipes for stuffed chicken, hare, pig, and dormouse."
Yum.
Wikipedia then goes on to note that in the Middle Ages, stuffing was "known as farce (from the French); the root of the word 'forcemeat.'"
Maybe that explains it. Stuffing is not real food. It's farce."
Dearest Christine - I think my day would be incomplete without a few tours around Slate. They don't hide their opinions, they use writers who are often pig-headed and wrong, and they are anti-sensationalist enough to be called post-sensational (or something to that effect). Is this an article from The Explainer? If you haven't already, you need to explore the year-end roundup of unanswered questions sent into The Explainer (e.g. "Why don't humans have a mating season?"). Absolutely wonderful waste of time.
ReplyDelete