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To Steam a Turkey
Rub butter, pepper and salt inside the turkey after it has been well washed, fill with oysters, sew up, lay in a dish and set in a steamer placed over boiling water. Cover closely and steam from two hours to two and a half. Take up, strain the gravy which will be found in the dish. Have an oyster sauce ready, prepared like stewed oysters, and pour into it this gravy thickened with a little butter and flour. Let it come to a boil and whiten with a little boiled cream. Pour this over the steamed turkey and send to the table hot. Garnish with sliced lemons.--Mrs. S. T.
An unusual treatment for a bird most cooks roast, and one that depends entirely on the size of the turkey and on a steamer large enough to hold it. The gravy that collects in the dish under the bird is the point of the method, so do not let it escape.
- Bird size is the hidden variableThe birds this method was written for were smaller than a modern supermarket turkey, and two to two and a half hours of steam suits a bird in the 8 to 10 lb range at most. A modern 16 to 20 lb turkey will not be cooked through in that time, and a bird that size will not fit a domestic steamer at all. Choose the smallest whole turkey you can find, or use this method on a large chicken or capon-sized bird.
- Use a thermometer, not the clockSteam at 212F cooks reliably but slowly through a dense stuffed bird. Take the thigh to 165F and check the oyster filling in the centre of the cavity separately; it must reach the same temperature. Under-heated shellfish packed inside poultry is the one real risk here.
- "Lay in a dish"A shallow heatproof platter or a low-sided baking dish that fits inside the steamer with room for steam to circulate. Its job is to catch the juices, which become the base of the sauce, so do not set the bird directly on a perforated rack.
- Rigging the steamerFew kitchens have a vessel this size. A large stockpot or roasting pan with a tight lid, water an inch deep, and the dish raised on a trivet or a ring of foil works. Check the water every 40 minutes and top up with boiling water so the pot never runs dry.
- Oyster sauce "prepared like stewed oysters"Oysters gently heated in their own liquor with butter and a little milk or cream, just until the edges ruffle, roughly two minutes. Anything longer and they shrink and turn rubbery.
- Boiled creamScalded cream, heated to just below a simmer, not reduced. Ordinary heavy cream stirred in off the heat does the same work today.
- ThickeningA little butter and flour means a beurre manié or a small roux, on the order of a tablespoon of each per cup of liquid. Add the strained pan juices to it, bring to a boil to cook out the flour, then finish with the cream and the oysters.
- No browningSteam leaves the skin pale and slack. The lemon slices and the pale sauce poured over the whole bird are doing the visual work; if that troubles you, the drained bird can go under a hot broiler briefly before saucing.
- YieldA turkey of that size with oyster stuffing should serve roughly eight to ten as a main course.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of oysters, and for good reason: the Chesapeake fishery was at its industrial peak in those decades, and barrels of shucked oysters moved inland by rail cheaply enough that they turned up in stuffings, sauces, fritters and soups all winter. Steaming a whole bird rather than roasting it belongs to the era of the wood or coal range, and it may well be that a steamer set over a pot gave a cook steady, unattended heat without the constant tending a roasting oven demanded; what is certain is that it produced the concentrated pan juices that this recipe builds its sauce on. The book's contributions are credited variously, part of a network of Southern women crediting one another's household knowledge at a moment when regional cookery was first being written down at length.