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Boiled Turkey
Wash the turkey thoroughly and rub salt through it; fill it with a dressing of bread and butter, moistened with milk and seasoned with sage, salt and pepper, and mixed with a pint of raw oysters; tie the legs and wings close to the body, place in salted boiling water with the breast downward, skim often, boil about two hours, but not till the skin breaks; serve with oyster-sauce. - Mrs. E. L. F., New York City.
A boiled bird is a lost technique rather than an unsafe one, and it rewards a light hand: the turkey is done when the flesh gives, not when the clock says so. The one thing to watch is the stuffing, which sits in the coldest part of the bird and needs verifying with a thermometer.
- Bird sizeThe recipe gives no weight. Two hours of gentle boiling suits a small bird, on the order of 8 to 10 lb; a modern 16 to 20 lb supermarket turkey will not cook through in that time, so buy the smallest bird you can find, or use a large capon-weight chicken.
- The hinge: never a hard boil"Boil about two hours, but not till the skin breaks" is the whole instruction. Bring the water to a boil, slide the bird in, then drop the heat to a bare shiver — 180 to 190F. A rolling boil splits the skin, the dressing escapes into the pot, and the breast shreds.
- Breast downwardNot decoration. It keeps the breast fully submerged and covered while the legs, which take longer, sit nearer the top of the pot — the same instinct as roasting a bird upside down for the first hour.
- Stuffing and the oystersRaw oysters mixed into bread dressing inside a bird is the point at which the temperature needs checking rather than trusting. Take the dressing to 165F on a thermometer pushed into the center of the cavity. Two hours in near-boiling water in a small bird will get there, but confirm it.
- A pint of oystersThat is a shucked pint, liquor included, roughly 1 lb of meat and somewhere around 20 to 30 medium oysters. It is worth draining them and using the liquor in the sauce rather than the stuffing, which will otherwise turn to paste.
- Salted water and the skimmingSalt the water as you would pasta water — it seasons the skin and nothing more, since the bird is stuffed and trussed. Skimming removes the gray albumen scum that would otherwise settle back on the breast and look unappetizing.
- TrussingTying the legs and wings tight is structural here. An untrussed bird in liquid splays open, the cavity floods, and the dressing washes out. Use butcher's twine and pull it snug.
- Oyster sauceIn period usage this is generally a white sauce — butter and flour, thinned with milk or the strained cooking liquor and the reserved oyster liquor — with whole oysters dropped in at the end and warmed just until their edges ruffle, about a minute. Longer and they toughen.
- YieldAn 8 to 10 lb bird with this much dressing serves 8 to 10. Save the cooking liquor: strained and defatted, it is a better stock than anything you will get from a roasted carcass.
Boiling was one accepted treatment for a large fowl in nineteenth-century American and English kitchens, and it survived in print long after roasting had taken over, partly because it demanded no oven and no attention to a fire's hot spots u2014 useful in a household cooking on a wood range. The oyster-and-bread dressing marks this as an East Coast recipe, and the contributor's New York City address fits: oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail, and the pairing of oysters with turkey at a holiday table was familiar in the period. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Ohio in the 1870s and 80s from readers' contributions, gathered recipes like this one from its contributors, which is why a Midwestern household manual carries a seaboard dish. The finished bird would have been served pale and unbrowned under a white sauce u2014 a look modern eyes read as underdone.