Home › The Principles of Cookery › Mutton, Potted
Mutton, Potted
Cut into thin slices, and then pound together in a mortar, eight ounces of well-dressed roast mutton, freed from fat and sinew, and half that quantity of boiled tongue; then mix with the pounded meat three ounces of good fresh butter, and add, while pounding, a salt-spoonful each of made mustard and white pepper, with a quarter of a grain of cayenne, and salt, if required. Store in a cool place, and in an earthen-ware jar, or in several small ones, over the contents of which should be run some clarified butter.
A Victorian potted meat: cooked mutton and tongue pounded with butter, packed into jars and sealed under a layer of clarified butter. The pounding and seasoning are unremarkable; the storage instruction is the problem.
- Why the cautionThe butter seal creates a low-oxygen environment over a low-acid, low-salt meat paste, and the recipe directs that it be kept only "in a cool place" — a larder, not a refrigerator. Those are the conditions in which Clostridium botulinum spores that survive cooking can germinate and produce toxin, which is odourless and tasteless and not destroyed by the brief warming a potted meat would ever get. There is no measured salt, no cure, no acid and no processing temperature anywhere in the method.
- The seasoning is not a preservativeA salt-spoonful of mustard, a little white pepper and a trace of cayenne season the paste and do nothing to control bacterial growth. Potted meats of this kind depended on cool storage and prompt eating rather than on any preservative in the mixture. If you want potted meat, use a current recipe with defined salt levels and refrigerated storage.
- Salt-spoon and grainA salt-spoon is usually reckoned at roughly a quarter teaspoon. A grain is about 65 mg, so a quarter of a grain of cayenne is around 16 mg — effectively a pinch.
- "Well-dressed" muttonHere it appears to mean properly cooked roast mutton rather than raw meat. The recipe seems to assume a joint from an earlier meal, trimmed of fat and sinew, which is what makes potted meats of this type a leftovers dish rather than a made-from-scratch one.
- Boiled tongueThe recipe does not say which; ox or sheep tongue, salted and simmered, was a common larder item in the period and is sold today mainly by butchers rather than supermarkets. In the mixture it presumably contributes colour and a firmer, saltier note against the plain mutton.
- The mortarEight ounces of meat plus four of tongue is a genuine arm's work in a mortar. The recipe pounds the meats first, then mixes in the butter, with the mustard, pepper and cayenne added while the pounding continues.
Potting was the English answer to the problem of a large roast in a house without refrigeration: the meat was pounded fine, bound with butter, packed down to exclude air and sealed with a layer of clarified butter that set hard on top. The technique is documented in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward, and by the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century potted beef, tongue, ham, chicken and game were standard breakfast and supper-table items, sold commercially as well as made at home. Mutton was then a far more common roasting meat in British households than it has been since, and a recipe like this one exists chiefly to use up the end of a joint — the addition of tongue is there to lift a meat that, cold and pounded, is otherwise rather flat. The butter seal that made potting possible is also what makes it unsuited to a modern kitchen, a hazard Victorian writers were in little position to appreciate.