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Oyster Stuffing for Fowls
Take two cups of bread crumbs; one tablespoon of butter; one tablespoon of chopped parsley; two teaspoons of salt; one-half teaspoon of pepper; twentyfive oysters. Rub the butter into the crumbs, add the seasoning, and put in the oysters last, leaving them whole.
A four-ingredient dressing that depends almost entirely on the oysters, and on not letting them overcook. Two points matter more than the rest: the stuffing must reach 165F if it goes inside the bird, and the crumbs need to be dry enough to absorb the oyster liquor.
- The hinge: stuffing temperatureRaw oysters packed into a body cavity heat slowly, and the center of the stuffing is the last thing in the kitchen to get hot. Check it with an instant-read thermometer and do not serve it below 165F, even if the bird itself is done. Baking the dressing in a separate dish gives you far better control and a browned top.
- Bread crumbsIn a book of this period this means torn or grated crumbs from a stale loaf, not the fine dried crumbs sold in canisters today. Use about 2 cups of loosely packed day-old bread torn small; commercial dried crumbs will turn pasty once the oysters release their liquor.
- OystersTwenty-five shucked oysters is roughly a pint, or two 8-oz containers of shucked meats. Drain them but keep the liquor in a cup; if the crumbs look dry after mixing, add it a spoonful at a time rather than all at once.
- SaltTwo teaspoons is a lot for two cups of crumbs, particularly with oysters and their liquor already carrying salt. Start with one teaspoon, mix, and taste the crumb mixture before the oysters go in.
- ButterOne tablespoon makes a lean dressing. The recipe says only to rub the butter into the crumbs; working it in cold rather than melting it distributes it better, and two tablespoons makes a richer result without turning it greasy.
- Leaving them wholeThe instruction is deliberate. Whole oysters steam inside the crumbs and stay plump; cut or stirred hard, they shed their liquor early and go stringy. Fold them in at the very end with a light hand.
- Do not assemble aheadNever mix the oysters into the crumbs and refrigerate the stuffing inside a raw bird. Combine everything at the moment of stuffing, or keep crumbs and oysters separate and cold until the bird goes into the oven.
- YieldEnough to fill a 4-5 lb roasting chicken; a 12-14 lb turkey would take two to three times this quantity. Baked separately in a shallow dish, it serves four to six as a side.
Oysters were cheap protein in nineteenth-century American cities, shipped inland by rail and barrel in cold weather and eaten in quantities that now read as extravagant, which is why a household manual can call for twenty-five of them in a side dish without comment. Oyster stuffing became fixed in the holiday repertoire of the Atlantic seaboard, and is still standard in parts of the Chesapeake and New England, where the bird was often served with an oyster dressing rather than a chestnut or sage one. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came out of a pattern and magazine publisher writing for middle-class housekeepers, and the recipe is given in this compressed style: a list of proportions, one sentence of method, and the assumption that the cook already knows how to fill and truss a fowl.