I was thunderstruck. It just wasn’t fair. What would I do now? I had come to this market to purchase two loaves of traditional San Francisco-style sourdough bread. These are long loaves made by old-time bakeries. These are not artisan breads by the modern definition, but they are nonetheless very good. They are long, one-pound loaves stuffed into longer paper bags. It is not uncommon for the bread to still be warm from the oven when you pick it up from the market. By the next day it will be stale. It is marketed under names like Pisano, Columbo, Parisian, Larraburu, and Toscano. It has plenty of the unique San Francisco sourdough flavor. It is the only bread that I like to use in my turkey stuffing. Sadly, it is no more.

It’s been a few years since I prepared a turkey and consequently made stuffing. It seems that in the time since I last made the stuffing, the few remaining brands of this old-time, local bread ceased to exist.

My mourning was short lived. The bakery in the market, it turned out, produced a San Francisco-style sourdough. It smelled like the real stuff, and after cutting into the loaf, the smell was even better. This stuff would probably work. And it did.

My recipe for stuffing has evolved since I developed it when I was living in Upstate New York in the early 1970s. I had always enjoyed my mother’s stuffing, but she only made it once a year for Thanksgiving. She never made more than would fit in the turkey. There was seldom enough. There was rarely any leftover the next day.

I called my mother and asked her for the recipe, but she said she didn’t have one. She just threw it together each year. So based on her guidance, I started to develop my recipe. The vegetables were straight forward: onions, celery, mushrooms, garlic, and parsley. So were the flavorings: pepper, thyme, and marjoram. The problem in Rochester in the 1970s was finding the right bread. I never did. But when I returned to Palo Alto in 1974, I had all the bread I needed.

In the early 1980s, a Chinese-American friend, Don Chew, taught me how to use a Weber kettle-style grill to quickly cook a turkey. I rapidly moved from the charcoal briquettes that Don instructed me to use to chunks of mesquite charcoal. To this, I added a layer of dampened hickory sawdust. I used my recently acquired surgical experience to sew both ends of the abdominal cavity tight, and stuffed it with various vegetables augmented with a serious sprinkling of dark, Chinese soy sauce and Shaoxing wine. I was now producing a turkey that was steamed from the inside and hot smoked from the outside. The results have been appreciated by guests for more than two decades. But since the cavity was walled off, there has been no place to cook the stuffing.

To paraphrase Alexander Graham Bell, when one cavity closes, another opens. Now I’m no longer limited to making stuffing to fill a void so I make lots more. I love it as a leftover, especially for breakfast, more than when I have it with the turkey.

The ingredient list below will produce about 24 amuse-bouche portions. After preparing the stuffing, it can be cut into individual cubes. These can be frozen until service. I remove as many as I need and fry them still frozen. By the time they are browned on all six sides, the center is soft and warm.