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Roasted Turkey Stuffed with Oysters
Prepare the bird as for roasting; crumble sufficient breadcrumbs to make four breakfast cupfuls and mix with it an equal quantity of crushed oyster crackers. Warm one-half pound of butter and stir it in with the breadcrumbs, with the liquor from four or five dozen oysters, and two beaten eggs. Put in the oysters, season the mixture to taste, then stuff the turkey with it, putting it in loosely so that the crumbs may absorb the gravy. Cover the bird with a thickly-buttered sheet of paper on a pan, and roast it in a hot oven, basting it often with butter. Ten minutes before removing the bird from the fire take off the paper, sprinkle over flour and salt, and baste it again with butter to color it. When cooked, place the turkey on a hot dish. Prepare some brown sauce with the contents of the drippingpan, pour a small quantity of it round the bird, and serve with the remainder in a sauceboat. Roast Turkey, Turkish Style Clean and truss a turkey. Wash and partly boil one breakfast cupful of rice, then drain it, and mix with it about one dozen chestnuts peeled and cut into small pieces, one-fourth pound of well washed currants, and two ounces of blanched and chopped pistachio nuts, seasoning the mixture with salt and a small quantity each of cayenne pepper and ground cinnamon. Put one-fourth pound of butter into a stewpan and place it over the fire; when melted pour in the mixture and stir it over the fire until well mixed with the butter. Stuff the turkey with this, sew up the breast, place it on a baking dish and bake it, keeping it well basted with butter. When cooked, place the bird on a hot dish, and serve with a sauceboatful of rich, clear gravy.
Two turkeys on one page: an American oyster dressing and a rice stuffing built on the Ottoman model. Both assume a cook who knows how to roast a bird and needs only the filling spelled out.
- The hinge: stuffing temperatureBoth stuffings go into the cavity raw, and the oyster version contains shellfish and beaten egg. Cook until the center of the stuffing registers 165F on a probe, not just the thigh; if the bird is done before the stuffing is, scoop the dressing into a buttered dish and finish it separately.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a modern measuring cup, generally taken as 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Four breakfast cupfuls of crumbs is roughly 4 to 5 cups; the quantity is forgiving, since the crumbs are meant to swell with oyster liquor and pan juices.
- OystersFour or five dozen shucked oysters is a large quantity, well over a quart. Reserve every drop of liquor, which is doing the work of stock here. Do not pre-cook them; they will firm up in the stuffing and any further simmering makes them tight.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'hot oven' in period usage is generally taken as somewhere around 400 to 450F. Practical modern approach: start at 425F for the first 30 minutes for color, then drop to 325F for the remainder, allowing roughly 15 minutes per pound for a stuffed bird.
- The buttered paperHeavy parchment, thickly buttered, is the period equivalent of a foil tent and still works well. It keeps the breast from drying out while the interior comes up to temperature. Removing it for the last ten minutes, then dusting with flour and basting, is a browning and glazing trick, not thickening.
- Brown sauce from the panOscar assumes a kitchen with brown sauce (espagnole) already made. Deglaze the roasting pan with stock and whisk in a little of the seasoned flour that has toasted on the bird, or simply build a pan gravy from the drippings; the oyster liquor in the stuffing will already have flavored them.
- For the Turkish-style ricePartly boil means about half-cooked, some seven or eight minutes, since the rice finishes in the cavity. Use peeled cooked chestnuts (vacuum-packed are fine), and soak the currants briefly if they are very dry. The mixture should be moist but not wet, or the rice will pack into a paste.
- Butter quantitiesHalf a pound in the oyster stuffing and a quarter pound in the rice is not a misprint; this is hotel cooking. Reducing each by a third gives a dressing that still holds together.
- YieldNeither recipe names a bird size. The oyster mixture is much the larger of the two and will likely leave dressing over for a side dish; the rice mixture is modest by comparison and will fill a cavity without surplus.
Oscar Tschirky was never a chef in the strict sense but as maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, and later the Waldorf-Astoria, he lent his name to the 1896 Cook Book by Oscar of the Waldorf, a vast compendium of the hotel's repertoire. Oyster stuffing belongs to a moment when American oysters were still cheap enough to be a bulk ingredient rather than a luxury: the beds of Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound supplied city markets by the barrel, and a Thanksgiving or Christmas turkey packed with four dozen of them raised no eyebrows in 1896. The oyster cracker mixed with breadcrumbs is a distinctly American touch, a hard, low-fat cracker that soaks up liquor without collapsing. The second recipe, the rice stuffing with chestnuts, currants, pistachios and cinnamon, recalls the Ottoman iç pilav, a stuffing pilaf traditionally used for poultry, though the resemblance is not exact.