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Oyster Stuffing
1 pint oysters
2 cups dry bread-crums
1 teaspoon salt
¼ cup butter or other fat
¼ teaspoon pepper
Mix the oysters well with the bread-crums and seasoning, and add melted butter or other fat.
A component recipe with no cooking instructions, which is how stuffings were usually printed: the book assumes you know what bird or fish it is going into. The proportions are small, so scale accordingly.
- A pint of oystersThis means shucked oysters with their liquor, roughly 16 fluid ounces or about 20 to 24 medium oysters. Shucked oysters are commonly sold in tubs of around 8 oz and 16 oz, so a 16 oz tub is about the amount wanted.
- Drain and chopDrain the oysters and reserve the liquor. Whole oysters make the stuffing wet and unevenly seasoned; chop them coarsely, then add liquor a spoonful at a time only if the crumbs stay powdery.
- Dry bread-crumbsIn period usage 'dry' crumbs meant crumbs from stale or oven-dried bread, often rolled fine, as distinct from 'soft' crumbs. If you want a lighter result, use stale bread torn or cut into small dice and left out overnight, about 3 to 4 slices for 2 cups.
- Or other fatThe likely alternatives are drippings, bacon fat, lard or margarine. Any of them work; melted butter gives the cleanest flavor with shellfish.
- YieldRoughly 3 to 4 cups, enough for a 4 to 5 lb roasting chicken or a large whole fish. For a 12 lb turkey, triple it.
- Cook it to temperatureOysters and crumbs make a dense, wet stuffing that heats slowly. Current practice is to bake it in a buttered dish rather than inside the cavity, and in either case to take it to 165F on a thermometer at the center.
- Do not overbakeOnce the center reaches temperature, stop. The oysters firm up quickly and go rubbery with extended heat, which is the usual fault in this dish.
Oyster stuffing belongs to the long American period when oysters were cheap protein rather than a luxury: Chesapeake and New England beds supplied barrels of them to inland cities by rail and they turned up in soups, fritters, pies and the Thanksgiving bird. By the 1920s, when Butterick was publishing household guides alongside its dress patterns, harvests had fallen and prices had risen, though whether that explains the recipe's leanness, with two cups of crumbs stretching a single pint of oysters, is a matter of speculation. The phrase "butter or other fat" is characteristic of the era's cookbooks, though it appears in American cookbooks well before the First World War and so cannot simply be attributed to wartime conservation campaigns.