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Chestnut Stuffing
Press meat from one quart boiled chestnuts through purée sieve. Moisten with butter, and season with salt and pepper. 2 cups cracker crumbs 1 tablespoon chopped onion 1 pint oysters 1 cup butter
The entry is written in the compressed style of its period: a paragraph for the chestnut purée, then a bare ingredient list that is meant to be combined with it. Read the two halves as one stuffing.
- What the list meansNothing tells you to combine, but that is the intent: the chestnut purée, cracker crumbs, onion, drained chopped oysters and butter are mixed together, with oyster liquor added if the mass is too dry. It should hold together loosely, not pack into paste.
- A quart of chestnutsThe original does not say whether the quart is measured before or after boiling. If in the shell, that is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb and would yield something like 2 cups of purée. Score each nut, boil 15-20 minutes, and peel while hot; the inner skin clings once cool.
- Cracker crumbsMost likely the plain common or soda crackers of the period, crushed coarse rather than milled to dust. Modern saltines will work but may be saltier, so hold back on the added salt until you have tasted.
- A pint of oystersThat is about 16-20 shucked medium oysters with their liquor, sold today in a pint tub. Drain them, chop coarsely, and reserve the liquor for moistening. Do not pre-cook them; they finish inside the bird and toughen quickly.
- A cup of butterTwo sticks, 8 oz, in addition to the butter already used to moisten the purée. Half that amount plus a little oyster liquor gives a stuffing that is easier to eat alongside rich poultry.
- The onionThe original calls for a single tablespoon, chopped, with no indication that it is cooked first. Softening it in a spoonful of the butter takes the raw edge off without changing the character of the dish.
- Yield and cookingThe quantities make roughly five to six cups, enough for a bird of moderate size. Whether stuffed in the bird or baked in a dish in a moderate oven, the center should reach 165F -- oysters and a dense purée heat slowly, so check with a thermometer rather than by the bird's own timing.
Chestnut and oyster stuffings were both familiar on the American holiday table when Lowney's Cook Book appeared in 1907, and pairing them made sense where oysters were cheap and abundant on the Atlantic coast. The chestnuts would have been American chestnuts, then a common street and forest tree; the blight that effectively erased the species from eastern woodlands was identified in New York in the first decade of the twentieth century, and within a generation recipes like this one depended on imported Italian or Spanish nuts instead. The book came from the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and carries a full domestic repertoire alongside its chocolate formulas -- which is why a shellfish stuffing sits in it at all.