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Chicken Stuffed with Oysters
Clean and wash the chicken, then fill the body with small oysters which have been dipped in salted and peppered melted butter. Sew up in netting or cheesecloth and boil, allowing about twenty-five minutes to the pound. Unwrap, wash with butter and lemon juice, and pour a few spoonfuls of oyster sauce over them, the rest into a boat.
A boiled fowl with oyster stuffing, in the plainest possible telling. Two things in it will mislead a modern cook: the sauce named at the end, and the cooking time.
- Oyster sauce means a cream sauceIn this period an oyster sauce is a butter-and-flour or cream sauce enriched with the oysters' liquor and a few chopped oysters, finished off the heat. It is not the bottled Chinese condiment of the same name, which would overwhelm the dish.
- The timing is the hingeTwenty-five minutes to the pound gives about an hour and forty minutes for a 4 lb bird, which is well past the point where breast meat dries out. Cook to temperature instead: the thigh and the centre of the oyster stuffing both need to reach 165F.
- Boil means barely simmerA rolling boil shreds the skin and toughens the meat. Keep the water at a bare tremble, the bird just covered, and skim the scum in the first ten minutes.
- Oysters in the cavitySmall oysters here most likely means the size of the shucked oyster itself rather than a shell measurement. Reserve the liquor from shucking for the sauce, and expect the ones inside the bird to be firm rather than plump after the long simmer.
- Netting or cheeseclothThe wrapping holds the shape and keeps the stuffing in. Two layers of damp cheesecloth tied at both ends does the job; sew or truss the vent first so oysters do not escape into the pot.
- Wash with butter and lemonThis means brushing the unwrapped bird with melted butter and lemon juice to gloss the pale, boiled skin. Do it while the chicken is still hot so the butter takes.
- The cooking liquidThe pot liquor is a light stock worth keeping, though it will be under-seasoned unless you add an onion, a carrot and a few peppercorns to the water at the start.
- YieldA 4 to 5 lb chicken with the oyster stuffing serves four to six, with the sauce boat passed at table.
Boiled fowl with oyster sauce was a fixture of English and American tables through the nineteenth century, when oysters were cheap enough to be used generously as a stuffing, a garnish and a sauce at once. Boiling rather than roasting suited a plump older hen and produced the pale, delicate meat that Victorian cookery admired; here the recipe has a few spoonfuls poured over the bird and the remainder sent round separately. Wrapping the bird in cloth or netting before it went into the water kept the skin unbroken and the stuffing in place, and let the cook lift the whole thing out without tearing it.