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Steamed Turkey
Cleanse the fowl thoroughly; then rub pepper and salt well mixed into the inside of it. Fill up the body with oysters mixed with a small cupful of bread-crumbs. Sew up all the apertures; lay the turkey into a large steamer and place over a kettle of boiling water; cover closely, and steam thoroughly for two hours and a half. Now take it up; set the platter in a warm place, and turn whatever gravy there is in the steamer, straining it first into the oyster sauce which you have prepared, in the following manner: Take a pint of oysters, turn a pint of boiling water over them in a colander. Put the liquor on to boil, skim off whatever rises on the top. Thicken it with a tablespoonful of flour rubbed into two tablespoonfuls of butter; season well with pepper and salt. Add two or three tablespoonfuls of cream or milk to whiten it; and pour it over the turkey and platter; serve boiling hot. This sauce must be made while the turkey is still in the steamer, so that it can be poured over the turkey as soon as it is taken up.
A boiled-and-steamed turkey rather than a roast one, with the oyster liquor doing double duty as sauce. Two things need attention: the doneness test and the fact that the bird comes out pale.
- Time is not the testTwo and a half hours is far too little for anything but a small bird, and the recipe gives no weight. Cook until a thermometer reads 165F in the thickest part of the thigh and, critically, 165F in the center of the oyster-and-crumb filling, which sits in the coldest part of the bird and lags well behind the meat.
- The vesselA domestic steamer basket will not hold a whole turkey. Use the largest stockpot you own with a rack set an inch or two above an inch of water, or a covered roasting pan on a rack over water; keep the water at a hard boil and top it up so it never runs dry.
- Only the liquor goes into the sauceNote what the sauce actually is: a pint of oysters is rinsed with boiling water in a colander and their liquor is boiled, skimmed and thickened. The drained oysters themselves are not used here. Reserve them for a stew or add them at the very end, off the heat, for a minute at most.
- Oysters cook in secondsThe oysters mixed into the body cavity will be long past tender by the time the bird is done, which is the period's expectation rather than ours. If you want plump oysters, keep them out of the cavity and fold them into the finished sauce.
- A pint of oystersRoughly two cups of shucked oysters with their liquor; the number in a pint varies a good deal with grade, so one standard grocery tub. If your tub is short on liquor, make up the pint with bottled clam juice or the strained steaming liquid.
- Thickening ratioOne tablespoon flour to two tablespoons butter is a loose, barely bound sauce for a pint of liquid. Equal parts butter and flour, about two tablespoons each, gives something that will coat the meat instead of pooling on the platter.
- The pale skinSteam produces flabby, gray skin. Here the sauce is poured over the turkey and the platter, which covers it; if you object, blot the bird dry and give it ten to fifteen minutes in a 450F oven before saucing.
- Sewing upTrussing needle and kitchen twine work, but poultry skewers or simply covering the cavity opening with foil under the truss will keep the filling in place with less fuss.
- YieldA 10 to 12 lb turkey serves eight to ten, with the sauce enough for all of them.
Steamed and boiled turkey belonged to a nineteenth-century American repertoire that treated the bird as a large fowl to be handled like any other boiling hen, and it survived into household books of this era. The oyster pairing is the more telling detail: East Coast oysters were cheap, bulk food, shipped inland by the barrel and sold by the quart, which is why so many books of the period call for a pint of them with no more ceremony than a pint of milk. Oyster dressing and oyster sauce at the holiday table are generally traced to that abundance rather than to any notion of luxury, and the habit outlasted the cheap oysters that created it.