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Grilse or Trout, to Pot
Take half a dozen fish; remove the bones, cut off the heads, tails, and fins, wash, and wipe them very dry. Pound in a mortar half an ounce of Jamaica pepper, a quarter of an ounce of cayenne, half an inch of whole ginger, four cloves, four allspice, and two chillies; mix these thoroughly. Put all in a bag, and place it on the fish, which must be laid in a pie-dish, backs uppermost. Strew a dessert-spoonful of salt over them, and pour on them three quarters of a pound of clarified butter. Tie three or four folds of paper over the dish, and bake in a moderate oven for nearly two hours. When cold, remove the bag, put the fish into a fresh jar, and pour clarified butter over them.
This is a Victorian keeping recipe: fish baked in spiced butter, then sealed under more butter in a jar to be eaten over the following weeks. The cooking is sound; the storage method is the problem, and it is not one that can be adjusted around.
- Why it fails: butter as a sealA layer of clarified butter over cooked fish creates an oxygen-free environment at ambient temperature. That is the textbook condition for Clostridium botulinum, and the non-proteolytic type E strains associated with fish grow at temperatures as low as about 3C, producing toxin without any smell, gas or off flavour to warn you. Potted fish is one of the classic historical vehicles for botulism.
- Why it fails: no acid, no measured cureThe only preservative here is a dessert-spoonful of salt across six fish, which is nowhere near the salt-in-water concentration needed to inhibit spore germination, and there is no acid at all. The two hours in the oven kills vegetative bacteria but not spores, which then have the sterile, anaerobic jar to themselves. If you want potted fish, use a current tested recipe with stated salt levels and refrigerated shelf life.
- GrilseA young salmon on its first return from the sea, typically 3-6 lb, once cheap enough in Britain and Ireland to be potted in quantity. Half a dozen of them, plus three-quarters of a pound of butter, tells you this was made for a larder rather than a meal.
- Jamaica pepper and allspiceThese are the same spice: allspice berries, called Jamaica pepper or pimento in nineteenth-century English books. The recipe listing both suggests either a compositor's error or that one entry meant whole berries and the other ground.
- The spice bagThe pounded spices go into a bag (the recipe does not say what kind) laid on the fish rather than rubbed in, so the flavour arrives as perfume through the butter. Half an ounce of allspice with a quarter ounce of cayenne is a fierce mixture by modern standards; the bag is what keeps it from overwhelming the fish.
- "A moderate oven" and the paperThe book gives no temperatures; 'moderate' in Victorian usage is generally taken as somewhere in the region of 350F, but that is a modern gloss rather than anything stated here. The three or four folds of paper tied over the pie-dish act as a lid: they trap steam and slow the browning of the butter over the long bake, much as foil does now.
Potting was the English answer to preserving cooked meat and fish before canning, and by the time Cassell's Dictionary appeared in the 1870s it was already an old technique — potted char from the Lake District and potted salmon from Scotland and Ireland were sold as regional delicacies, packed in pots and sealed with a thick disc of clarified butter for travel. Grilse, a salmon returning to the river after a single winter at sea, was abundant and comparatively cheap, which is why it appears alongside trout as the everyday fish for the job rather than full-grown salmon. The heavy hand with cayenne, chillies and allspice reflects both taste and function: highly spiced butter masked the flatness of fish that had been in the pot for a week or two. The method survives in modern kitchens only as a short-keeping potted fish or potted shrimp, eaten within a few refrigerated days, and the long larder storage the original assumed has been abandoned for good reason.