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Forcemeat of Oyster
Get very fresh oysters, beard them, and cut them into quarters. Grate bread enough to fill a half-pint measure, and one ounce and a half of finely-shredded suet or butter, which should be broken into bits. Mix all these ingredients together with a good flavouring of herbs, and a seasoning of salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg. Bind with two well-beaten eggs. This forcemeat is for boiled or roast turkey. It may be made also into balls and used as a garnish. Eighteen oysters are sufficient for one turkey.
A Victorian oyster stuffing, scaled for a single bird. The quantities are small and the mixture is wetter than most modern stuffings, so the binding needs watching.
- The half-pint of crumbsAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, so about 1¼ US cups of loose grated breadcrumbs, roughly 2 to 2½ ounces by weight. Use dry-ish crumbs from a stale white loaf, not soft fresh ones, or the mixture will slump.
- Bind sparinglyTwo beaten eggs is generous for this amount of crumb, particularly once the oysters release their liquor. Add one egg first, judge the texture, and hold the second back unless the mixture will not hold together when pressed.
- BeardingThe beard is the dark frilled gill around the edge of the oyster. On modern shucked oysters it is often already trimmed or negligible; pull off any tough dark fringe and reserve the liquor, which can be strained in if the forcemeat is dry.
- SuetAn ounce and a half of shredded beef suet is about 3 tablespoons. Packet shredded suet works directly; butter, as the recipe allows, should be cold and diced rather than melted so it melts through during cooking.
- Herbs"A good flavouring of herbs" is left to the cook; the usual choices in books of this period are parsley and thyme, sometimes with marjoram or grated lemon rind. Around 2 tablespoons chopped parsley and a teaspoon of thyme suits this quantity.
- If you stuff the birdForcemeat packed inside a turkey must reach 165F/74C at the centre, which usually means the breast overcooks. Baking it in a dish alongside, or as balls, gives a better result and is safer.
- Balls as garnishRoll into walnut-sized balls and fry or bake 8 to 10 minutes, until firm and browned. Longer and the oyster pieces turn to rubber; they need only a couple of minutes of real heat.
- YieldEighteen oysters with the crumb and egg give roughly 2 cups of forcemeat, or about 16 small balls.
Oysters were cheap in nineteenth-century Britain, dredged in quantity from the Thames estuary, the Essex flats and the Firth of Forth, and they appear repeatedly in Cassell's as a seasoning ingredient rather than a luxury: in sauces, in patties, in the stuffing of a bird. Forcemeat itself is an old kitchen word, from the French farce, meaning a bound and seasoned mixture used to fill or to garnish, and the Victorian repertoire ran to many versions distinguished largely by the flavouring agent. Oysters and turkey share a cold-weather season, which may be part of why the two were paired. Oyster stuffing also became established on the American Thanksgiving table, though whether that followed from British practice or from local oyster abundance is not clear. The stated rule of eighteen oysters to one turkey is a reminder of how the book worked: a dictionary of proportions for cooks who already knew the method.