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Char, Potted
For a seasoning take three tea-spoonfuls of black pepper and allspice mixed, two of mace, one each of cloves and nutmeg, all finely ground. Mix and keep well corked up, and when used add a little salt. This is enough for fourteen pounds of fish. Cut open the fish; clean well with a dry cloth, but do not wash. Remove the heads, tails, fins, and backbone, then rub the spices well into the fish. Put with the spices into a baking dish; cover well with fresh butter, and place the dish in a slow oven, to remain until the bones are dissolved, which will take about five hours. Drain off the butter, and put the fish into earthenware pots; press it down firmly, and pour a thin layer of fresh butter over the top. Other fish, such as trout, eels, sprats, shrimps, and prawns, may be done in the same way. Cost uncertain.
This is a preserving recipe, not simply a baked fish dish, and the preserving method is the part that no longer stands up. The points below explain what the instructions mean and where the danger lies.
- The butter seal is the hazardCooked fish packed tight into a pot and capped with butter is a low-acid food held in an oxygen-free environment, which is precisely the condition Clostridium botulinum requires to produce toxin. Nineteenth-century larders were cool, but the recipe names no cure, no temperature and no keeping time, so there is nothing here to control that risk.
- No cure, no measurementThe seasoning is spice and "a little salt" added at the point of use — far too little, and far too vaguely specified, to inhibit anything. Contrast this with a proper salt or nitrite cure, where quantities are weighed against the weight of the fish.
- "Until the bones are dissolved"Five hours in a slow oven will soften the small bones of char or sprats. It also destroys any sense of doneness as a guide, so the cook has no signal that the fish has been held long enough — or too long — for safety.
- If you want potted fishUse a current recipe that specifies refrigeration and a short eating window. The method itself is sound cooking; the storage assumptions built into this version are not.
- QuantityThe spice mix is scaled to fourteen pounds of fish, a batch size that only makes sense when the object is to fill a row of pots.
- The fish itselfChar here means Arctic char, Salvelinus alpinus — historically the Windermere population, now closely managed. Farmed Arctic char is widely sold, and the trout, eels, sprats, shrimps and prawns listed as substitutes are all still available.
- Do not washThe instruction to wipe with a dry cloth rather than rinse appears in other potting recipes, apparently on the reasoning that added water shortens keeping. It reflects the preserving intent of the dish rather than any modern hygiene practice.
Potted char was the signature luxury of the English Lake District. Char were netted in Windermere and the neighbouring lakes, cooked down in spiced butter, and sent south in shallow lidded earthenware vessels — the decorated "char pots", often painted with a picture of the fish itself, that survive in museum collections and are generally dated to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Potting was the standard English answer to a glut of anything perishable: cook it thoroughly, pack it hard to exclude air, and seal the surface with clarified butter, a technique applied equally to beef, game, shrimps and cheese.