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To Steam Chicken
Soak two hours, in salt and water, a fat young pullet. Drain and dry. Rub in the cavity a little salt and pepper and a large lump of butter. Fill with large, plump oysters, seasoned with pepper and salt, and sew up. Lay the chicken on a dish or pan, and set it inside a steamer, which close and keep over boiling water four hours. When thoroughly done, lay on a dish and pour over it drawn butter or celery sauce. Garnish with curled parsley, and serve.--Mrs. S. T.
A whole chicken stuffed with oysters and steamed rather than roasted — gentle, pale cookery of a kind that has largely fallen out of fashion. Almost everything here works as written except the clock.
- Cut the time hardFour hours of steaming will reduce a young bird to threads. A 3–4 lb stuffed chicken over steadily boiling water should be checked from about 1 1/4 hours and may want closer to 1 3/4; go by 165F in the thigh and in the oyster stuffing rather than by the clock. The long period in the original may reflect a tougher bird and a less controllable heat source.
- PulletA young hen, under a year old. A supermarket roasting chicken of 3–4 lb stands in well; a 5 lb bird will want longer. Birds sold as pullets in the period were often smaller than that.
- The salt soakTwo hours in salt and water is a brine, and it does help a steamed bird, which gets no browning or crust to carry flavor. Roughly 1/4 cup kosher salt per quart of cold water (use less if the salt is fine-grained), refrigerated, then drained and patted dry. Skip it if you have bought a bird already brined or kosher-salted.
- OystersShucked oysters, drained. About a pint fills a 4 lb bird loosely. Do not pack the cavity — the oysters release liquid and need room, and a tight stuffing takes far longer to come up to temperature than the meat around it.
- Setting up the steamerThe dish or pan under the chicken is not incidental: it catches the oyster liquor and drippings, which are worth pouring into the sauce. Any large pot with a rack and a tight lid works. Keep the water at a real boil and top it up with boiling water so the heat never drops.
- Drawn butterIn this period it means a simple butter sauce — butter melted with a little flour and hot water or stock, whisked smooth — not merely melted butter. Celery sauce is the same base finished with cooked, sieved celery.
- ServingServes four. Steamed skin stays flabby and pallid, so either remove it before serving or slide the bird under a hot broiler for a few minutes; the garnish of curled parsley was doing real work on a plate this colorless.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers — hence the terse signature "Mrs. S. T." — comes from a region where oysters were cheap, local and eaten in quantity. Oysters turn up throughout the book in soups, patties, fritters and stuffings, and pairing them with poultry seems to have been unremarkable rather than luxurious: the oyster supplied liquor, salt and body to a bird that had none of the flavor of roasting. Steaming a whole fowl, rather than roasting or boiling it, is often said to have suited delicate eating and invalid cookery, since it kept the flesh moist without leaching it into a pot of water. The four-hour instruction is a useful reminder that a wood range's steam pot was watched by feel rather than by thermometer.