Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › To Boil a Turkey
To Boil a Turkey
Mrs. Robert Beaty.
Make a stuffing for the craw of chopped bread and butter, cream, oysters, and the yolks of eggs; sew it in, and dredge flour over the turkey, and put it to boil in cold water, with a spoonful of salt in it, and enough water to cover them well; let it simmer for two hours and a half, or, if small, less time; skim it while boil ing; it looks nicer if wrapped in a cloth dredged with flour; serve it with drawn butter, in which put some oysters.
A boiled turkey is a poached turkey, and the whole success of it rests on keeping the water at a bare shiver. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what drawn butter is and owns a pudding cloth, so a few translations are in order.
- Never let it boilDespite the title, a rolling boil shreds the breast and tightens the skin until it splits. Bring it up slowly and hold the water at 180-185F, where it barely trembles, for the whole cooking time.
- The crawThis is the crop, at the front of the neck end. The stuffing goes into the neck cavity and the flap of skin is sewn shut over it, not into the body cavity.
- Drawn butterIn nineteenth-century American books this is not clarified butter but a simple flour-and-butter sauce loosened with stock or the poaching liquid, roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of liquid. The oysters go in at the very end.
- Oyster timingOysters in the stuffing will be cooked to death over two and a half hours; they act more as seasoning than as oysters. The oysters for the sauce need only 1-2 minutes off the heat until their edges ruffle.
- Timing and donenessTwo and a half hours suits a bird of about 8-10 lb. Reckon roughly 15-18 minutes per pound and check with a thermometer: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh and in the centre of the stuffing.
- The saltA single spoonful of salt in a pot large enough to cover a turkey seasons almost nothing. Salting the bird a day ahead, or salting the water properly, makes a considerable difference to poached poultry.
- The clothWrapping in a floured cloth keeps the skin intact and pale. A double layer of muslin tied at both ends does the job; skim the scum off the surface for the first twenty minutes or it settles back onto the cloth.
- ServingAn 8-10 lb bird serves about 8-10. Boiled turkey carves best after 20 minutes' rest out of the pot, and the strained cooking liquid makes a far better base for the sauce than water.
Boiling was the respectable alternative to roasting in kitchens without a reliable oven or a spit, and a boiled turkey with oyster stuffing and oyster sauce was a standard centrepiece for winter tables on both sides of the Atlantic through the nineteenth century. Oysters were then cheap and abundant along the eastern seaboard and were shipped inland to Ontario, where The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 for the Hospital for Sick Children, one of many community cookbooks, assembled from contributions signed with the donors' married names, as this one is. The pale, cloth-wrapped boiled fowl went out of fashion once home ovens became dependable and roasting no longer needed a fireplace and a turnspit, and the dish now survives mainly as a curiosity, though the technique is simply poaching and treats a large bird kindly.