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Chicken and Ham, to Pot
Pound separately the white meat of a cold fowl, and an equal weight of ham, beef, or tongue. Season the fowl with salt, pepper, and pounded mace, and the other meat with pepper only. Put alternate layers of each into a jar, place a slice of butter on the top, and bake for an hour and a half. Let them get cold, then pour some clarified butter on the top rather thickly. A little may be eaten with bread and butter for breakfast or luncheon. Probable cost, 4d., exclusive of the cold meat.
A Victorian potted meat, meant as a standing breakfast relish rather than a dish served hot. Most of the work is in the pounding, and most of the risk is in the storage.
- The hinge: pound it wet enoughCold cooked poultry beaten dry turns to sawdust. Work each meat in a food processor with a spoonful or two of softened butter, or a little of the jelly from under a roast, until it forms a smooth paste that holds together when pressed.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. A moderate oven, around 325-350F, is a reasonable modern reading, though the original supplies no such term. Covering the jar and standing it in a tin of hot water are modern precautions against the edges browning and drying, not instructions from the recipe.
- The jarPotting was commonly done in straight-sided earthenware or stoneware pots, though the recipe specifies nothing. Any small ovenproof dish or wide ramekin will do; avoid anything with shoulders, which makes the potted meat hard to spoon out cleanly.
- Pounded maceBlade mace crushed in a mortar. Ground mace from a jar is the same spice and works, but use it sparingly - about a quarter teaspoon to a pound of meat - as it dominates quickly.
- SaltSeason the fowl only, as the original directs. Ham and tongue are already cured and salted, which is probably why the second meat gets pepper alone - though the recipe also allows plain beef. Taste the finished paste before it goes into the jar.
- The butter seal is not a preservative hereClarified butter poured on top excludes air, which was the whole point in an unrefrigerated larder. It does not make the contents shelf-stable by modern standards. Refrigerate the covered jar and eat within three or four days; discard it if the seal has been broken and the surface left exposed.
- Yield and servingHalf a pound of each meat will fill a couple of ramekins and serve several people as a spread; the original gives no quantities. Serve it cold on brown bread or toast, as the original intends - it is not meant to be reheated.
- The cost noteFourpence covers the butter and spice only. The recipe assumes you already have the remains of a roast fowl and a piece of ham in the house.
Potting was the English answer to preserving cooked meat before refrigeration: pound it fine, pack out the air, and seal the surface under a layer of fat. The technique is documented in English household books from the seventeenth century onward, and by the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the 1870s and 80s it had settled into exactly this domestic role - a way of using up the white meat of a fowl and the last of a ham, turned into something that could sit in the larder and be spread on bread for breakfast or luncheon.