Marilyn Monroe’s Handwritten Turkey-and-Stuffing Recipe

Entire indus­tries seem to have sprung up around the mis­sion of demon­strat­ing that Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe did more in her short life than become an icon — the icon — of mid­cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can star­let­hood. We here at Open Cul­ture have pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured not just her famous­ly pho­tographed read­ing of James Joyce’s Ulysses, but the con­tents of her per­son­al library as well. The new book Frag­ments pro­vides a great deal of rich ephemera to those schol­ars of Mon­roe’s pur­suits off the screen, includ­ing, as Matt Lee and Ted Lee in the New York Times describe it, “assort­ed let­ters, poems and back-of-the-enve­lope scrib­blings that span the time from Monroe’s first mar­riage in 1943 to her death in 1962.” The arti­cle appears in the paper’s Din­ing & Wine sec­tion thanks to one Mon­rov­ian frag­ment of par­tic­u­lar inter­est this time of year: her per­son­al recipe for turkey and stuff­ing.

“Scrawled on sta­tionery with a let­ter­head from a title insur­ance com­pa­ny,” write Lee and Lee, “the recipe describes in some detail how to pre­pare a stuff­ing for chick­en or turkey. The for­mu­la is exten­sive in the num­ber of ingre­di­ents (11, not includ­ing the 5 herbs and spices, or salt and pep­per), and in their diver­si­ty (3 kinds of nuts and 3 ani­mal pro­teins). It is unortho­dox for an Amer­i­can stuff­ing in its use of a bread loaf soaked in water, wrung dry and shred­ded, and in its lack of added fat, broth, raw egg or any oth­er binder.” You can find a tran­script of the steps right below. And if you give a whirl on Thanks­giv­ing, let us know how it turns out.

For the Stuff­ing

• No gar­lic
• Sour­dough
• French bread — soak in cold water, wring out, then shred
• For chick­en giblets — boil in water 5–10 mins
• Liv­er — heart then chop
• 1 whole or ½ onion,  chop & pars­ley / four stalk cel­ery,  chop togeth­er fol­low­ing spices — put in rose­mary
• Thyme, bay leaf, oregano, poul­try sea­son­ing, salt, pep­per,
• Grat­ed Parme­san cheese, 1 hand­ful
• 1/2lb – 1/4lb ground round — put in fry­ing pan — brown (no oil) then mix raisin 1 ½ cuops or more
• 1 cup chop nuts (wal­nuts, chest­nuts, peanuts)
• 1 or 2 hard boiled eggs — chopped mix togeth­er

To Prep the Bird

• Salt & pep­per inside chick­en or turkey — out­side same and but­ter
• Sew up clamp birds put chick­en or turkey in 350 oven
• Roast­ing chick­en — 3or 4lbs or larg­er
• Cooks 30 min to 1lbs
• Brown chick­en or pheas­ant (vine­gar, oil, onion, spices) — let cook in own juice
• Add lit­tle water as you go
• ½ glass vine­gar — put in when half done
• Cooks 2 hours
• Put pota­toes
• Mush­room — but­ton canned
• Peas — fresh

via NYTimes,  Brain Pick­ings and The Dai­ly Mail

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe Reads Joyce’s Ulysses at the Play­ground (1955)

Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe Explains Rel­a­tiv­i­ty to Albert Ein­stein (in a Nico­las Roeg Movie)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, lit­er­a­ture, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Face­book page.