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Oyster Stuffing
Make a stuffing of bread crumbs, season with parsley, thyme, and onion juice, and moisten with melted butter. Add 2 dozen small chopped oysters.
A period stuffing formula rather than a measured recipe: it assumes you know how much bread a bird will hold. The one thing to get right is that the oysters must go in raw and only just chopped, so they cook through in the bird without turning to rubber.
- Quantities are left to the cookNo amount of crumbs is given. For a 10-12 lb turkey, work from about 8 cups of dry bread crumbs or torn stale bread; for a 4-5 lb chicken, 3-4 cups. Two dozen small oysters suit the larger bird, and about a dozen the smaller.
- Onion juiceA once-common seasoning made by grating a halved onion on a fine grater and using the liquid, which flavours without leaving raw pieces. A teaspoon of the juice, or half a small onion grated to a pulp, is enough for a turkey's worth of crumbs.
- Bread crumbs meant stale breadIn this period crumbs were made at home from day-old loaf, coarse and irregular. Packaged fine dry crumbs pack too densely and give a pasty stuffing; tear or pulse stale bread instead.
- Oyster liquorDrain the oysters and keep the liquor. The melted butter alone will not moisten 8 cups of crumbs -- add the strained liquor, and stock or a little cream if the mixture still crumbles when squeezed.
- Temperature is the hingeOyster stuffing cooked inside a bird must reach 165F at the centre of the stuffing, checked with a thermometer, not just in the thigh. Because the oysters release liquid, the centre heats slowly; many cooks now bake this in a buttered dish for 35-40 minutes at 350F and serve it alongside.
- Do not overcook the oystersThey need only a couple of minutes of real heat. Chop them coarsely, about three pieces to an oyster, and fold them in last so they are not mashed into the crumbs.
- HerbsThe recipe does not say whether the parsley and thyme are fresh or dried. For a turkey quantity, roughly 3 tablespoons chopped parsley and 1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves, or a teaspoon of dried thyme.
- YieldThe turkey quantity above makes roughly 8 cups, enough for ten to twelve servings as a side dish.
Oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail through the second half of the nineteenth century, which is why they turn up in American cookbooks in places a modern reader finds surprising -- in soups, in patties, in sauces for boiled fowl, and here bulking out a bread stuffing for the holiday bird. Oyster stuffing is strongly associated with the mid-Atlantic and the Chesapeake, where the beds were richest, though it was eaten well beyond them, and it remains a Thanksgiving dish in those regions. Seasoning with onion juice rather than chopped onion fits a strain of the period's cookery that favoured smooth textures; grating onions for their juice is a recurrent instruction in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century recipe books and later falls out of use.