Home › Sauces › Boiled Turkey and Oyster
Boiled Turkey and Oyster
Stuffing. Ingredients for stuffing.
Quarter pound of Suet.
Grated rind of half a Lemon.
A teaspoonful of chopped Parsley.
Salt, Cayenne, and grated Nutmeg.
Six ounces of Bread-crumbs.
This is the forcemeat component of a boiled turkey with oyster sauce, given as an ingredient list only orms of the day assumed the cook knew what to do with a bowl of crumbs and suet. Here is what the list leaves unsaid.
- There is no binder listedSix ounces of crumbs to four ounces of suet will not hold together dry. Period forcemeats of this type are bound with one or two beaten eggs, or a little milk or stock; without one the mixture will fall apart in the bird and in the pot.
- SuetBeef suet, shredded or grated fine, not the shredded packet kind if you can avoid it, since that carries flour and stabilisers. Butcher's suet should be picked free of membrane and grated while cold. A quarter pound is roughly 115 g.
- Bread-crumbsSix ounces is about 170 g of soft white crumb, not dried or toasted crumbs. Modern packaged dry crumbs absorb quite differently and will give a dense, pasty stuffing.
- Cayenne and nutmegBoth are left to the cook's judgement, as was usual. A pinch of cayenne and a scant quarter teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg suit this quantity, which leaves the lemon rind well forward.
- Where the oysters goIn the full dish the oysters belong in the sauce, not the stuffing, though some period versions also chop a few bearded oysters into the forcemeat. If you add them, make sure the forcemeat itself reaches a safe temperature rather than relying on the bird to firm them up.
- YieldThis makes roughly 300 g of forcemeat, which will do the neck end of a moderate bird or a batch of forcemeat balls poached alongside. It is not enough to fill the body cavity of a large turkey.
- Stuffing inside a boiled birdA boiled turkey sits in barely simmering water for a long stretch, and the centre of a packed cavity heats slowly. Stuff the neck end only, keep it loose, and check that the forcemeat itself reaches 165F/74C before serving. Cooking the forcemeat separately as balls avoids the problem entirely.
Boiled turkey with oyster sauce was a fixture of the British Christmas and cold-weather table through the nineteenth century, and it survived into the cookery-school manuals that followed. Boiling rames really poaching in a cloth rames kept the flesh white and moist, which was prized in a way that roast browning was not, and the pale bird was finished with a white oyster sauce built on the poaching liquor. The stuffing itself is a textbook English forcemeat of the older kind: suet, soft crumbs, lemon rind, parsley and nutmeg, a formula traceable in more or less this form to eighteenth-century receipt books, where it served equally for veal, fowl and forcemeat balls. Oysters appear here not as luxury but as everyday provision rames they were cheap and abundant in British ports until overfishing and disease reversed that in the early twentieth century, which is one reason the dish faded from ordinary kitchens.