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Fowl, with Oysters
A fowl, cooked according to the following recipe, will have a decided superiority of flavour over one boiled in the usual way. Put a young fowl, well filled with oysters from which the beards have been removed, into a stone jar, and this again into a saucepan of water. Cover the jar to prevent the steam escaping, and stew gently. The gravy in the jar, of which there will be a sufficient quantity to serve with the fowl, may be made, with the addition of an egg and a little cream, into a white sauce; or it may be simply thickened with butter and flour. Time, one hour and a half to stew. Oysters, 1s. 9d. to 2s. per dozen.
This is a bain-marie method dressed up as a stew: the bird cooks in its own steam inside a sealed jar, and the jar sits in simmering water so nothing ever boils hard. The technique is sound and the concentrated gravy is the point of it.
- The hinge: the jar must be sealedAll the flavour advantage comes from trapping the steam so the juices condense back into the jar rather than escaping into the water bath. Cover the vessel with a tight lid or a double layer of foil crimped down, and keep the water at a bare simmer for the full time.
- What to use instead of a stone jarAny heatproof, straight-sided vessel that will sit in a deep pan works: a stoneware bean pot, a Pyrex bowl, or a small enamelled casserole. Stand it on a folded cloth or trivet so it is not in direct contact with the pan base, and keep the water level around two-thirds up the sides, topping up with boiling water as it evaporates.
- "A young fowl"Roughly a modern 3 to 4 lb chicken. Victorian "fowl" could mean an older, tougher laying hen, though this recipe specifies a young bird; modern birds are tender, so check rather than assume, and treat 1 hour 15 minutes as the earliest point worth testing.
- DonenessBecause the bird is stuffed with raw shellfish, judge it at the centre of the cavity, not the thigh. The stuffing and the thickest part of the meat should both reach 165F; a probe through the vent into the middle of the oysters is the reading that matters.
- BeardsThe "beard" is the dark frill of gill and mantle tissue around the edge of a shucked oyster. Recipes of the period routinely called for it to be removed; it is edible, and it can be left on. Use shucked oysters with their liquor, and pack the cavity loosely so steam can circulate.
- Oyster textureOysters held at temperature this long will firm up considerably and give their liquor to the gravy, which is the intended trade. If you want plump oysters as well, keep back half a dozen and warm them in the finished sauce for a minute off the heat.
- The egg-and-cream sauceWhisk the egg with the cream, then temper it with a ladle of hot jar gravy before returning it to the pan. Keep it below 180F and stir constantly; if it boils it will curdle. The butter-and-flour version is more forgiving: cook a scant tablespoon of each together, then whisk in the gravy.
- Yield and the price noteServes about four. The "1s. 9d. to 2s. per dozen" is a market price note for the reader, not a quantity; the recipe specifies no number, but a dozen to eighteen oysters would fill a bird of this size.
Cooking a bird sealed in an earthenware jar set in a pan of water is a long-established way of getting a moist result out of a doubtful fowl, and the same trick of a covered jar in a water bath lies behind jugged hare. The oysters are not a luxury flourish here so much as a seasoning: through the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century oysters were cheap and plentiful in Britain, dredged from beds in the Thames estuary, Essex and Whitstable and sold by the barrel, and they went into stuffings, pies, sauces and steak puddings to lend saltiness and body. The note of the price per dozen belongs to a period when that was changing: overfishing and pollution had begun to thin the native beds, and by the end of the century the oyster was drifting from a labourer's supper towards a delicacy. The recipe's claim of "a decided superiority of flavour over one boiled in the usual way" is plausible enough -- boiling a fowl in water leaches its juices into the pot, while the sealed jar keeps them for the gravy.