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Ham, Potted
Take one pound of lean ham and a quarter of a pound of fat, or, in place of this, two ounces of fresh butter. Pound the meat to a smooth paste, and flavour it with a quarter of an ounce of powdered mace and a pinch of cayenne. Press into a dish and bake through gently. When cold pour melted butter over. Keep in a cool place. It may be used for breakfast or luncheon, or for sandwiches. Any remains of cold ham may be potted. Cooked ham need not be baked. Lard or dripping should not be poured over the ham while hot.
A straightforward potted meat, but two things in the original need translating: the spicing is far heavier than modern palates expect, and the butter seal should be understood as a barrier against air, not as a method of preservation.
- The seal is not a preservativeClarified butter poured over potted meat excludes air and slows surface spoilage, but it creates a low-oxygen environment over a low-acid cooked meat. Treat the finished pot as a refrigerated item, keep it below 40F, and eat it within three or four days rather than the weeks a Victorian larder was assumed to buy you.
- Mace, in perspectiveA quarter of an ounce is roughly three and a half teaspoons of ground mace for a pound of meat, which will read as medicinal today. Half a teaspoon to a teaspoon, with the pinch of cayenne, gives the intended warm, faintly nutmeg-like note without swamping the ham.
- "Bake through gently"If you are starting from raw ham, that means a slow oven; the recipe gives no temperature, and a slow oven is usually rendered today as somewhere around 300F. Cook until the centre of the pressed paste reaches 160F on a probe. This is the hinge of the recipe: a dense potted mixture heats slowly and the middle lags well behind the edges.
- Cooked ham needs no ovenThe line is easy to skip. With leftover cooked ham you simply pound, season, press and seal, so the dish becomes a five-minute preparation and the oven step is irrelevant.
- PoundingA mortar was the original tool and it produced a genuinely smooth paste. A food processor does the same in under a minute; pulse the fat or butter in last so the mixture emulsifies rather than turning greasy.
- Fat or butterTwo ounces of butter stands in for four ounces of ham fat, so butter gives a leaner, softer result. Use unsalted, and taste before adding any salt at all: cured ham usually brings enough.
- Why not to pour the fat on hot meatHot lard or dripping soaks into warm meat instead of setting on top, so no seal forms, and steam trapped under the fat leaves droplets of water where spoilage starts. Chill the potted ham fully, then pour over clarified butter that is only just liquid.
- YieldA pound of ham with its fat makes about two cups, or roughly eight rounds of sandwiches.
Potting was the English answer to the terrine: cooked meat, fish or game pounded with butter and spice, packed tight into a pot and sealed under a layer of fat to keep air out. It flourished from the seventeenth century onward and by the time Cassell's was compiled it had become a routine way of using up the last of a joint, which is exactly the spirit of the closing lines here. Mace was the near-universal potting spice, generally traced to its keeping qualities and its affinity with pork and veal, and it appears so consistently in these recipes that its scent is practically the signature of the genre. Potted ham belonged to the breakfast table and the sandwich basket rather than to dinner, and the commercial paste sold in jars later in the century is often said to descend from the household version.