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Dripping, Potted
Take six pounds of beef dripping; boil it in good soft water, and strain into a pan till cold; remove it from the pan, and clear off the gravy that adheres to the under part; repeat the boiling process several times, and take away the sediment. When quite clear, and free from gravy, put the dripping into a saucepan with six bay-leaves, a quarter of an ounce of white pepper, a few cloves, and half a pound of salt. Let it melt at a very gentle heat, and when it is hot enough to pour strain it through a sieve into the pot, and cover it over to get cold. Or it may be melted without any addition, except the salt, and, if required for pastry, this latter mode is the preferable.
This is a method for clarifying and storing beef dripping, the fat collected from roasting joints. Everything depends on getting the water and meat juices out; the flavourings are optional.
- The hinge: get every trace of gravy outDripping turns rancid and sour because of the meat juices and water trapped in it, not the fat itself. The repeated boil-and-chill washing here is the whole point of the recipe, and the scraping of the brown jelly from the underside of the cold cake is the step people skip.
- Scale it downSix pounds is a quantity that suggests an accumulation from many roasts rather than a single one. A pound or two behaves identically; keep the proportions of salt and spice roughly in step.
- "Good soft water"Victorian recipes often specify soft water where hard water was thought to affect the result. Ordinary tap water is fine here; the fat and water are separated again in any case.
- Very gentle heat means gentleThe recipe wants the fat only just hot enough to pour, which is little above its melting point; keep it well short of the point where it browns or smokes. Browned dripping tastes scorched.
- The salt does not dissolveHalf a pound of salt to six pounds of fat is not a seasoning rate, and salt is essentially insoluble in fat, so much of it is caught in the sieve or settles out rather than flavouring the fat evenly. Expect the bottom of the pot to be much saltier than the top.
- Why the plain version for pastryBay, clove and pepper carry over into whatever you fry or bake, which is welcome in savoury pastry and unwelcome in a fruit tart. For shortcrust use the unspiced, lightly salted dripping and reduce the salt in the flour accordingly.
- Strain properlyA sieve alone leaves fine sediment. Line it with muslin or a coffee filter; specks of meat are the main cause of spoilage in stored fat.
- StorageCover the surface completely and keep it cold. Well-clarified dripping holds for months refrigerated and much longer frozen; kept at larder temperature it will eventually go rancid however clean it is.
Dripping was the by-product no Victorian kitchen wasted. Meat was roasted on a spit or in a tin before an open fire, and the fat that fell into the pan below was collected, clarified and used again for frying, for basting, for pastry and for spreading on bread with a little salt and the brown jelly beneath the fat, which children were often given as a treat. The right to sell surplus dripping was one of the traditional perquisites of a cook in a large household, a source of enough friction that nineteenth-century domestic manuals are said to have discussed it directly. It is essentially a piece of kitchen housekeeping: how to turn an accumulating, perishable by-product into a keeping fat of reliable quality. Much the same approach is still followed in the rendering of any animal fat, and dripping itself never entirely disappeared in Britain, where beef fat is still argued over as the correct medium for chips.