Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Roasted Chicken with Oyster Sauce
Roasted Chicken with Oyster Sauce
Pick and draw two chickens; chop fine a sufficient quantity of oysters with truffles to fill them, season with chopped parsley, spices, salt and pepper, and stuff the birds with the mixture; then truss them, lay them in a baking-pan, pour butter over, and roast in the oven. Blanch twenty or thirty oysters, put them in a stewpan with a lump of butter, a few tablespoonfuls of chopped herbs, and a small quantity of olive oil, and toss them about over the fire for about twenty minutes. Mix one wineglassful of white wine and about a teacupful of stock with the oysters, put in half an ounce of butter kneaded with half a tablespoonful of flour, and stir it over the fire until thick. When the chickens are cooked, remove them from the oven, untruss, place them on a hot dish, arrange the oysters around with slices of lemon, pour the sauce over, and serve.
A late-Victorian hotel dish written for a cook who already knew how long a chicken takes. Two things need attention: the oysters in the sauce, and the temperature of the oyster stuffing inside the birds.
- The oysters in the sauceTwenty minutes over the fire will shrink them to erasers. Toss them in the butter, herbs and oil for about two minutes, until the edges just ruffle, then lift them out and keep them warm while you build the sauce; return them at the very end, off the heat.
- The stuffing has to reach temperatureChopped raw oysters packed into a bird cavity heat slowly. Take the thigh to 165F and check the centre of the stuffing at 165F as well; if the birds are browning too fast, tent them with foil. Cooks who would rather not chase both numbers can bake the oyster-truffle mixture in a buttered dish alongside.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. 375F is right for two small birds: roughly 1 to 1 1/4 hours for chickens of 3 to 3 1/2 lb, longer if stuffed. Baste with the butter from the pan.
- "Pick and draw"Pluck and gut — you are buying birds already dressed. Two chickens of about 3 lb each, or a pair of poussins for a more elegant service.
- Old measuresA wineglassful is about 2 fl oz of white wine; a teacupful of stock is about 6 fl oz. Half an ounce of butter is a generous tablespoon, kneaded with half a tablespoon of flour — this is a beurre manie: work them to a paste and whisk it in in pieces so it does not lump.
- TrufflesTruffle was costly in 1896 too, but far more routine on a hotel order sheet than it is in a home kitchen now. Preserved truffle peelings, or a small amount of finely chopped brown mushroom cooked dry with a few drops of truffle oil, will carry the dish without pretending to be the same thing.
- Blanching the oystersGive them ten to fifteen seconds in their own liquor or in simmering water, no more, and save that liquor to strengthen the stock — it is the best flavour in the dish.
- YieldTwo small chickens serve four to six. Serve at once; oyster sauce turns thin and grey if it stands.
Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and put his name to this book in 1896, was cooking at the tail end of the great American oyster century. New York harbour and the Chesapeake supplied oysters in such volume that they appeared at every price point, from street barrows to hotel banquet menus, and a kitchen could afford to use thirty of them as a garnish. Oysters with poultry is an old pairing in both English and French practice — oyster stuffing and oyster sauce for boiled fowl are standard in early nineteenth-century cookery books — and Oscar's version is the hotel treatment of it, with truffle in the forcemeat and a flour-thickened wine sauce poured over at the table. The dish reads as a period marker in two ways: the casual abundance of shellfish, and the assumption that the reader needs no oven temperature.