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Fowl, Potted
Cut the meat off the bones of a cold roast fowl. Pound it in a mortar, with butter in the proportion of four ounces to every pound of meat. The skin and gristle should be carefully removed before the meat is weighed, and the butter should be of the best kind. Add, while pounding, six or seven grates of nutmeg, a small pinch of pounded mace, with salt and cayenne. A mixture of ham will be found very relishing; it should be first grated, and then pounded with the fowl to a smooth paste. Fill small pots, and cover with clarified butter. Keep in a dry place, and tie down with bladder.
This is a preservation recipe rather than a simple spread: the butter cap and the bladder cover are there to keep cooked poultry edible for weeks without cold storage. That is the part that does not survive contact with modern food safety knowledge.
- The butter seal is the hazardClarified butter poured over meat and tied down under bladder creates a sealed, oxygen-free layer over a low-acid, moist, cooked protein. That is precisely the environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores, which survive roasting and are not destroyed by pounding, can germinate and produce toxin. Nothing in the method heats the potted meat afterwards to any lethal temperature.
- "Keep in a dry place" means room temperatureA Victorian larder was cool but not cold, and the recipe gives no storage temperature, no time limit, and no acid or measured cure. Botulinum toxin produces no smell, no off taste and no visible change, so the usual household test of sniffing the pot tells the cook nothing.
- Handling after cookingThe meat is pulled from the bone, boned, weighed, pounded in a mortar and packed by hand, all after the only cooking step. Every one of those stages is an opportunity for Listeria and staphylococcal contamination, and the finished paste is never brought back up to temperature.
- Ham makes it worse, not betterThe grated ham is added for flavour, not preservation, and the quantity is left entirely to the cook. It contributes no reliable amount of nitrite and should not be read as a cure.
- BladderThe cover is a cleaned animal bladder, soaked and tied over the pot rim, where it dried and shrank to a tight skin. It was a common closure for potted meats and preserves before waxed paper and screw caps, and it is worth knowing what the word means even though the technique should not be revived.
- If you want potted chickenUse a current, tested recipe with defined refrigeration and a stated keeping time. Do not adapt this one by guesswork.
Potting was the English answer to charcuterie: instead of salting, smoking or encasing meat in fat as a confit, cooks pounded cooked flesh with butter to a paste, packed it into small earthenware pots and sealed it under a lid of clarified butter. The practice is well established in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward, covering everything from beef and venison to lampreys, char and the shrimps that still carry the name. Here it is a way of using up cold roast fowl, a common purpose of potted meats in a large household: a joint appeared hot, then cold, then pounded into a pot for breakfast toast and sandwiches. The seasoning -- nutmeg, mace and cayenne -- belongs to a long-established English potting palette, and such spices were sometimes credited with keeping power as well as flavour. The insistence that the butter be of the best kind is practical rather than fussy: butter with milk solids or moisture left in it is more prone to turning rancid.