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Game Toast
Pound up any kind of cooked game in a mortar, mix with it half its bulk of butter; season with pepper, salt, a few grains of cayenne, and a squeeze of lemon. Make it very hot, and serve on slices of hot buttered toast.
A leftovers dish in the potted-meat family, meant for the savoury course at the end of dinner. The whole thing turns on the ratio of butter to meat and on getting it hot without letting the butter split.
- What counts as gameAny cooked pheasant, partridge, grouse, pigeon, hare or venison, picked clean of skin, sinew and shot. Leftover roast birds are the likely material; the darker leg meat pounds down more easily than dry breast meat.
- Half its bulk of butter'Bulk' implies volume rather than weight, and it is a great deal — a rich ratio built for thin toast points, not sandwiches. Around 4 oz of picked meat to 2 oz of softened butter is in the right region; a smaller proportion of butter, with a spoonful of the bird's jelly or a little stock, will keep it spreadable.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar did in ten minutes, but it gives a smoother, pastier result. Pulse rather than run it, or chop by hand and mash with a fork if you want the older, shreddier texture.
- Make it very hotHeat it gently in a small pan or a bowl over hot water, stirring, only until it steams. Direct heat over a burner splits the butter out and the mixture goes greasy and grainy.
- SeasoningSeason after warming and taste again, since the butter mutes seasoning when cold. A few grains of cayenne means a pinch, and the lemon is doing the work of cutting the fat, so do not leave it out.
- The toastCut thin, crusts off, buttered and still hot — soft or cooled toast collapses under the hot paste. Serve immediately; this does not hold.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; a small bird might yield perhaps 5 to 6 oz of mixture, enough for a few savoury-sized toasts.
- Keeping itIf you want to store it rather than serve it hot, pack it into a small pot, level the top and seal with clarified butter — then treat it as any potted meat and eat within three or four days from the refrigerator.
This belongs among the small hot savouries that closed a Victorian and Edwardian dinner, after the sweet and before the dessert fruit — anchovy toast, devilled kidneys, mushrooms on toast and their relations. It is really potted game served warm rather than cold, and potting is one of the oldest English methods of preserving cooked meat: pounded fine, bound and sealed with butter, kept in a crock. The recipe exists because a roast bird was expected to be used up completely. Game arrived at a household in season and often in quantity — a brace of pheasants, a hare, a bag of pigeons — and the carcase went to stock while the last shreds of meat went into a mortar. Cayenne and lemon in a savoury are characteristic of the period's taste for a sharp, peppery finish to a long meal, often traced to the influence of Anglo-Indian cooking on the late nineteenth-century English table.