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Oyster Stuffing (Tablespoon salt teaspoon)
1 tablespoon salt 1 teaspoon pepper 1 tablespoon chopped celery cup boiling water or hot milk Parboil oysters, dip in melted butter, add remaining ingredients, and use for stuffing chicken, turkey, or goose. 2 cups hot mashed potato cup salt pork cubes 2 tablespoons onion
A seasoning-and-liquid formula for an oyster stuffing, meant to be worked into a bread or cracker base and packed into poultry. The proportions given are for the seasonings only, so the bulk ingredients have to be judged by eye.
- The hinge: barely parboilOysters want no more than a minute in their own liquor, just until the edges ruffle. Any longer and they tighten into rubber during the hour or more the bird spends in the oven.
- Quantities to judge yourselfThe oyster count is not given, no base ingredient of any kind is named in the surviving text, and the liquid measure has lost its fraction. If one assumes the usual bread- or cracker-crumb base, a stuffing seasoned with 1 tablespoon salt would take on the order of a quart of dry crumbs, a pint of oysters and about half a cup of the boiling water or hot milk, added last and sparingly - but these figures are a guess, not a reading of the recipe.
- Hot milk or boiling waterBoth appear because the choice changes the result: milk gives a softer, richer, more pudding-like stuffing, water a lighter one that stays crumbly. Add either a spoonful at a time; oysters release a good deal of liquor of their own.
- Salt and the oyster liquorA full tablespoon of salt assumes unsalted crumbs and unsalted butter. Taste before committing, since oyster liquor is already saline and modern shucked oysters are packed in it.
- Stuffing inside the birdAny stuffing cooked inside poultry should reach 165F at its centre, which in practice often means the bird is overcooked before the stuffing is safe. Baking it in a buttered dish alongside, moistened with a little stock, is the reliable course.
- CeleryOne tablespoon of chopped celery is a token amount by current taste. Half a cup of finely diced stalk, softened in the butter first, suits a stuffing of this size better.
- YieldIf the guessed quantities above are used, enough for roughly a 10-12 lb turkey or two roasting chickens. The original gives no yield.
Oyster stuffing belonged to the American holiday table by the time this book appeared. Along the eastern seaboard oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail and barrel through the cold months, which is precisely when turkey and goose were roasted; the pairing is generally traced to that seasonal overlap rather than to any single cook. The salt pork and mashed potato appearing at the end of the text are the opening ingredients of a separate potato dressing built on rendered pork and onion, a common New England approach, rather than part of this recipe.