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Two Eggs (Three dozen Oysters)
Three dozen Oysters.
Stuff the turkey with the above ingredients mixed thus: chop the suet very fine, mix it with crumbs, and the lemon-peel grated, chopped parsley, salt, cayenne, and grated nutmeg; take the beards off the oysters, add them and their liquor strained, and lastly the eggs; mix all well together, and fill the turkey with this stuffing at the neck end. Put the turkey breast downwards into hot water, let it come to the boil, skim it well, and M 2 boil gently for an hour and a half to an hour and three-quarters according to size. Serve with celery sauce poured over and round.
This is the second half of a stuffing recipe that has been split across a page break: the title preserves the tail of the ingredient list (two eggs, three dozen oysters) and "the above ingredients" refers to a list that sat above it. What survives names everything you need, but not the quantities.
- The missing quantitiesFrom the method, the stuffing is suet, breadcrumbs, grated lemon peel, chopped parsley, salt, cayenne, nutmeg, three dozen oysters with their liquor, and two eggs. Only the eggs and oysters are given as amounts; a workable ratio for a bird this size is roughly 8 oz suet to 12 oz breadcrumbs, but that is a reconstruction, not the book's figure.
- "M 2"The stray "M 2" mid-sentence is a printer's signature mark identifying the gathering of pages, not an instruction. Ignore it.
- BeardsThe beard is the dark frilly gill around the edge of a shucked oyster. Pinch it off; it stays tough and stringy in a stuffing while the body of the oyster goes soft.
- Oyster liquorStrain it through muslin to catch shell grit, and count it as part of your liquid. Three dozen oysters release enough that a stuffing built to normal breadcrumb proportions can end up sloppy — hold some back and add it to the celery sauce instead.
- SuetFresh beef suet from a butcher, chopped fine as directed. Packet shredded suet works and saves the chopping; vegetable suet behaves the same way here.
- Boiling a turkeyAn unfamiliar method now, but it was standard for a white-fleshed bird served under a pale sauce. Use a pot deep enough to submerge the turkey, start it in hot rather than cold water so the surface sets, and keep it at a bare tremble — a rolling boil shreds the breast.
- DonenessAn hour and three-quarters assumes a smallish bird by our standards. Do not go by the clock: check that the thickest part of the thigh and, critically, the centre of the oyster stuffing have both reached 165F/74C, since a dense wet stuffing inside a submerged bird heats slowly.
- Neck-end stuffingThe recipe fills only the neck cavity. Whatever the reason, it has the practical effect of keeping the stuffing in a shallow layer where it will more readily cook through, and the skin flap can be folded under and secured with a skewer.
- Celery sauceA béchamel or velouté in which celery has been stewed until soft, then sieved or blended. Make it while the turkey rests; a few spoonfuls of the strained cooking liquor sharpen it.
Boiled turkey with oyster forcemeat and celery sauce was a fixture of the British Christmas and New Year table through the nineteenth century, sitting beside the roast rather than replacing it — boiling gave a paler, milder bird that suited a white sauce. Oysters were then a cheap bulking ingredient rather than a luxury: the great English and Irish beds were still being dredged in enormous quantity, and oysters went into stuffings, sauces, patties and steak puddings as a matter of routine, a habit that faded as the beds were overfished and as pollution and contamination scares hit the trade in the later 1800s. The pairing with celery is seasonal logic as much as anything, celery being at its best in midwinter.