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Boiled or Steamed Turkey
Clean, rub well with salt, pepper and lemon juice, and stuff with oyster or bread stuffing. It is better without the stuffing, as the same flavor may be obtained from an oyster sauce served with the turkey. Truss the leg and wings close to the body, pin the fowl in a cloth, as it keeps it whiter and preserves the shape. Plunge into boiling, salted water. Allow twenty minutes to the pound. Cook slowly till tender, but not long enough for it to fly apart. Turkeys are much nicer steamed than boiled. Serve with oysters, celery, lemon or caper sauce. Garnish with a border of boiled rice or macaroni, and pour a part of the sauce over the fowl. Fowls are delicate and nice stuffed with boiled celery cut in pieces an inch long, or with boiled macaroni seasoned with salt and pepper.
A whole turkey cooked in water or steam rather than roasted — pale, moist, and entirely dependent on its sauce. The method still works, but the timing given is from an era before thermometers and will destroy the bird.
- The timing is the problemTwenty minutes to the pound puts a 12 lb turkey in the pot for four hours. Cook instead to temperature: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone, which on a simmered bird of that size will come well short of four hours — start checking at around the two-hour mark. The instruction "not long enough for it to fly apart" shows the author was at least alert to the risk of overcooking.
- Simmer, never boil"Plunge into boiling, salted water" then drop the heat immediately to a bare shiver — surface barely moving, around 180-190F. A rolling boil tears the skin, shreds the breast and clouds the broth you will want for the sauce.
- Pinning in a clothA clean, unbleached muslin or cheesecloth wrap, tied or pinned closed, keeps the skin unbroken and the shape intact. Butcher's twine and a double layer of cheesecloth do the job; skip any cloth that has been washed in scented detergent.
- Fit the bird to the potA modern 14-16 lb supermarket turkey will not submerge in most domestic stockpots. A 10-12 lb bird is the practical ceiling, and steaming — which the author prefers anyway — needs only a couple of inches of water and a rack, with the lid weighted or foil-sealed.
- Take the advice about stuffingThe recipe is right that the bird is better empty. A wet-cooked stuffing absorbs poaching water, turns to paste, and slows the heat reaching the centre of the cavity. Bake any dressing separately and lean on the sauce for flavour.
- Oyster sauceBuild it on the poaching liquid: a blond roux, a ladle of the broth reduced and enriched with cream, then shucked oysters and their liquor slipped in off the heat. Oysters need about two minutes, just until the edges ruffle — held longer they tighten into rubber.
- Save the brothA large quantity of well-seasoned turkey stock comes out of this. Strain, chill, lift the fat, and use it for the sauce, the rice border, or soup the next day.
- YieldA 10-12 lb bird serves ten to twelve with the rice or macaroni border. Carve it in the kitchen — a poached turkey looks unimpressive whole and will not hold together for a tableside performance.
Boiled fowl was a standard of nineteenth-century American and English tables, and turkey was simply the largest bird to which the method could be applied. Before reliable ovens, a covered pot over a controllable fire offered its own advantages, and the pale, moist meat that resulted was considered genteel — whiteness in poultry, as in bread and sugar, is often said to have carried real social weight, which would explain why the cloth wrapping is justified here as keeping the bird "whiter." The oyster sauce is a period signature: oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail through the last decades of the century, and they appear throughout American cookbooks of this vintage as a sauce, a stuffing and a garnish for almost any boiled meat. The suggestion of a border of rice or macaroni may reflect the influence of formal service, where a plain boiled bird was expected to arrive ringed by something to give the platter shape.