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Boiled Fowl
Take a young fowl and fill the inside with oysters; place in a jar and plunge into a kettle of water; boil for one and one-half hours; there will be a quantity of gravy in the jar from the juice of the fowl and the oysters; make this into white sauce with the addition of egg, cream, or a little flour and butter; add oysters, or serve up plain with the fowl. This is very nice with the addition of a little parsley to the sauce.
This is a fowl cooked in a sealed vessel set in boiling water — a bain-marie rather than a true boil, which is why the bird gives up so much concentrated liquor. The method is sound; the vagueness is all in the vessel and the sauce.
- The hinge: no water in the jarNothing is added to the jar but the fowl and the oysters. All the "quantity of gravy" comes from the bird and the shellfish, so the jar must be covered (a plate or foil) and the kettle water must never boil up over the rim. Diluted, the gravy is not worth making into sauce.
- What "a jar" meansA stoneware or earthenware crock deep enough to hold the bird. A wide-mouth canning jar, a heatproof pudding basin or a small enamelled pot all work. Set it on a folded cloth or a trivet in the kettle so it is not in direct contact with the base, and start it in hot rather than cold water only if the vessel is tempered — thin glass will crack from thermal shock.
- "Young fowl"In period usage "fowl" generally means a domestic chicken, often a mature bird rather than a spring chicken; something in the region of 3 to 4 lb is a reasonable modern stand-in. Ninety minutes at a steady simmer should bring it past 165F at the thigh, but check with a thermometer rather than trusting the clock, as a covered jar heats more slowly than open water.
- The oysters insideThese are stuffing, not a garnish — they season the bird and thicken the liquor, and after an hour and a half they will be small and firm. That is expected here. The oysters you actually want to eat are the ones added to the finished sauce at the end, off the heat, for two minutes at most.
- Making the white sauceStrain the jar liquor. Either thicken it with a beurre manié (about 1 tablespoon each butter and flour per cup of liquid), or enrich it off the heat with cream and an egg yolk. If you use the yolk, keep the pan below a simmer or it will curdle.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Taste the strained gravy before thickening; the oyster liquor may already carry enough salt, and it may need nothing but pepper and the parsley.
- Quantities and yieldThe original gives none. As a working guide, about a pint of shucked oysters in all, with roughly two thirds inside the bird and the rest for the sauce; one fowl of this size will serve about four.
Cooking a bird inside a covered jar standing in boiling water appears in nineteenth-century cookbooks as a way of getting the flavour of a pot-roast without a pot-roast's evaporation: little escapes, and the concentrated juices become the sauce. The pairing of poultry with oysters looks extravagant now but was affordable in 1870s North America, when oysters were cheap, barrelled and shipped inland by rail in large volume -- oyster stuffing, oyster sauce and scalloped oysters appear throughout the community cookbooks of the period. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was one of the first Canadian charity cookbooks, compiled from contributions by ladies of Toronto and other cities and towns, which accounts for the loose, conversational instructions.