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Roast Turkey with Oyster Dressing
Dress and rub turkey thoroughly inside and out with salt and pepper, steam two hours or until it begins to grow tender, lifting the cover occasionally and sprinkling lightly with salt. Then take out, loosen the legs, and rub the inside again with salt and pepper, and stuff with a dressing prepared as follows: Take a loaf of stale bread, cut off crust and soften by placing in a pan, pouring on boiling water, draining off immediately and covering closely; crumble the bread fine, add half a pound melted butter, or more if to be very rich, and a tea-spoon each of salt and pepper, or enough to season rather highly; drain off liquor from a quart of oysters, bring to a boil, skim and pour over the bread-crumbs, adding the soaked crusts and one or two eggs; mix all thoroughly with the hands, and if rather dry, moisten with a little sweet milk; lastly, add the oysters, being careful not to break them; or first put in a spoonful of stuffing, and then three or four oysters, and so on until the turkey is filled; stuff the breast first. Flour a cloth and place over the openings, tying it down with a twine; spread the turkey over with butter, salt and pepper, place in a dripping-pan in a well-heated oven, add half a pint hot water, and roast two hours, basting often with a little water, butter, salt and pepper, kept in a tin for this purpose and placed on the back of the stove. A swab made of a stick with a cloth tied on the end, is better than a spoon to baste with. Turn until nicely browned on all sides, and about half an hour before it is done, baste with butter and dredge with a little flour-this will give it a frothy appearance. When you dish the turkey if there is much fat in the pan, pour off most of it, and add the chopped giblets previously cooked until tender, and the water in which they were cooked, now stewed down to about one pint; place one or two heaping table-spoons flour (it is better to have half of it browned) in a pint bowl, mix smooth with a little cream, fill up bowl with cream or rich milk and add to the gravy in the pan; boil several minutes, stirring constantly, and pour into the gravy tureen; serve with currant or apple jelly. A turkey steamed in this way does not look so well on the table, but is very tender and palatable. It is an excellent way to cook a large turkey.
A two-stage method — two hours of steaming, then two hours of roasting — meant for a very large bird in a wood-fired range. It works in a modern kitchen with a few translations.
- Stuff at the last minuteThe turkey comes out of the steamer hot and is then filled with raw oysters and returned to the oven. Assemble the dressing while the bird steams, but do not pack it in until the moment it goes into the roasting pan, and check that the centre of the stuffing reaches 165F before serving.
- "A well-heated oven"The book works by feel and gives no numbers; a brisk oven of this sort is usually read as somewhere around 400F. Since the bird is already half-cooked from the steaming, 375F for the roasting stage is more manageable and less likely to dry the breast.
- Bird sizeThe author says outright it is "an excellent way to cook a large turkey," but names no weight. Two hours of steaming plus two of roasting will overcook a small modern bird. Cook to 165F in the thigh rather than by the clock.
- A quart of oystersThat is shucked oysters in their liquor, about 4 cups, or roughly two to three dozen small to medium oysters. Their liquor is used separately, boiled and skimmed, to soak the crumbs; the oysters themselves go in last and raw so they do not toughen.
- Half a pound of butterTwo full sticks for one loaf of bread. It reads as excessive because the dressing was expected to be rich and because a stale 19th-century loaf was denser and drier than most bread sold now. Six to eight tablespoons gives a comparable result with modern bread.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk.
- The floured clothA flour-dusted cloth tied over the vent and neck opening kept the stuffing in. Skewers or a folded skin flap do the same job.
- The basting swab and the flour dredgeA cloth-wrapped stick spreads the fat and water mixture better than a spoon, and the flour dusted on in the last half hour blisters into the "frothy" crust the book prizes. Both are worth keeping.
- YieldA large bird with a full loaf of dressing will serve a dozen or more, with leftovers.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the late 1870s, compiled from the contributed recipes of Midwestern housekeepers, and oyster dressing at a holiday table is one of the clearest markers of its moment. Oysters were not a coastal luxury by then: barrels of them moved inland by rail and canal through the middle of the century, and by the 1870s an Ohio cook could buy them shucked and in liquor. The steaming step is usually explained by the wood range, where holding a steady roasting heat for four hours was difficult and a large old bird ar its its first year — needed the moist heat to become tender at all, though this remains inference rather than established fact. The author's frank admission that a steamed turkey "does not look so well on the table" is characteristic of the book, which consistently prefers a good result to a handsome one.