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Roast Turkey with Oyster Dressing
Dress and rub turkey thoroughly inside and out with salt and pepper, steam two hours or until it begins to grow tender, lifting the cover occasionally and sprinkling lightly with salt. Then take out, loosen the legs, and rub the inside again with salt and pepper, and stuff with a dressing prepared as follows: Take a loaf of stale bread, cut off crust and soften by placing in a pan, pouring on boiling water, draining off immediately and covering closely; crumble the bread fine, add half a pound melted butter, or more if to be very rich, and a tea spoon each of salt and pepper, or enough to season rather highly; drain off liquor from a quart of oysters, bring to a boil, skim and pour over the bread-crumbs, adding the soaked crusts and one or two eggs; mix all thoroughly with the hands, and if rather dry, moisten with a little sweet milk; lastly, add the oysters, being careful not to break them; or first put in a spoonful of stuffing, and then three or four oysters, and so on until the turkey is filled; stuff the breast first. Flour a cloth and place over the openings, tying it down with a twine; spread the turkey over with butter, salt and pepper, place in a dripping-pan in a well-heated oven, add half a pint hot water, and roast two hours, basting often with a little water, butter, salt and pepper, kept in a tin for this purpose and placed on the back of the stove. A swab. made of a stick with a cloth tied on the end, is better than a spoon to baste with. Turn until nicely browned on all sides, and about half an hour before it is done, baste with butter and dredge with a little flour-this will give it a frothy appearance. .
When you dish the turkey if there is much fat in the pan, pour off most of it, and add the chopped giblets previously cooked until tender, and the water in which they were cooked, now stewed down to about one pint; place one or two heaping table-spoons flour (it is better to have half of it browned) in a pint bowl, mix smooth with a little cream, fill up bowl with cream or rich milk and add to the gravy in the pan; boil several minutes, stirring constantly, and pour into the gravy tureen; serve with currant or apple jelly. A turkey steamed in this way does not look so well on the table, but is very tender and palatable. It is an excellent way to cook a large turkey.
This is a two-stage bird: two hours of steaming before it ever sees the oven, which is why the roasting time looks short for a large turkey. The method works, but it changes how you judge doneness.
- The hinge: steam first, then stuffThe turkey is steamed unstuffed, then stuffed and roasted. Do not stuff it before steaming — the dressing would sit for two hours in the temperature range where bacteria multiply. Stuff it just before it goes into the oven, as written.
- Steaming vesselYou need a large covered pot with a rack that holds the bird above an inch or two of simmering water — a stockpot or a roasting pan with a tight lid and a trivet. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up; two hours will boil a shallow pan dry.
- "A well-heated oven"The book gives no temperature. A hot start of roughly 400 to 425F to set the skin, dropping to 350F for the remainder, is one modern reading, but those numbers are an interpretation and not in the text. The bird is already half-cooked, so the roasting stage is mostly about browning and bringing the stuffing up to temperature.
- Temperature, not timeTwo hours of roasting is a guide only. The oyster dressing is the limiting factor: it must reach 165F at the center of the cavity, and the thigh should read 170F to 175F. Oyster stuffing packed cold into a hot bird can lag well behind the meat.
- Half a pound of butterThat is two sticks for one loaf of bread, and the recipe offers "more if to be very rich." Six tablespoons gives a dressing modern palates will recognize; the full half pound is authentic and very rich indeed.
- Oysters and their liquorA quart of shucked oysters is roughly 25 to 40 medium ones depending on size -- enough to stuff a large bird generously. Boiling and skimming the liquor is worth doing: it lifts coagulated protein and grit, and the liquid carries a good deal of the flavor into the crumbs.
- Sweet milk and cream"Sweet milk" means plain unsoured whole milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabber also kept in the kitchen. The gravy's "cream or rich milk" is fine as heavy cream cut with milk, or half-and-half.
- The floured clothA flour-dusted cloth tied over the cavity openings does the job of trussing and keeps the stuffing in. Kitchen twine and a skewer work as well; if you use the cloth, make sure it is cotton and untreated.
- Browned flour in the gravyToasting half the flour dry in a skillet until it is the color of cinnamon deepens the color and flavor of the giblet gravy. Browned flour thickens less than raw flour, so the amount needed varies; the recipe allows "one or two heaping table-spoons."
- YieldA bird of the size this method suits — 14 to 18 lb — with this quantity of dressing serves 12 to 16.
Steaming a turkey before roasting it was a practical answer to a real problem: birds sold in the nineteenth century were often older and tougher than anything in a supermarket case today, and dry heat alone left the legs sinewy while the breast dried out. The book is honest about the trade-off — "does not look so well on the table, but is very tender" — which is the sort of candor that makes these community-compiled cookbooks useful. The oyster dressing points to the other great convenience of the period: barreled and canned oysters traveled inland by rail from the Chesapeake and the Gulf in large quantity, so that by the 1880s an oyster stuffing could mark a festive table well away from any coast. The Dixie Cook Book (1883) was one of many regional adaptations of the Buckeye Cookery family of books, assembled from contributed household recipes, and the swab-for-basting tip and the tin of basting liquid kept warm on the back of the stove are exactly the kind of detail that came from a working kitchen rather than a professional one.