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OX CHEEK, POTTED (a breakfast or supper dish)
Pick the meat from an ox cheek which has been simmered until it is quite tender. Mince it very finely, and mix with it a tea-spoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, a quarter of a nutmeg, grated, and a table-spoonful of powdered thyme. Put it in a plain mould, cover with a dish, and place a weight upon the top. Serve cold. Time, four hours to simmer the ox cheek. Probable cost, 6d. per pound. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A pressed meat loaf that sets on its own gelatine rather than being sealed under butter, which is what most Victorian "potting" meant. The hinge is the cheek itself: it must be simmered until genuinely collapsing, because the collagen it releases is the only thing binding the mould.
- Ox cheekBeef cheek, sold by butchers and increasingly in supermarkets. Cheek weights vary; two cheeks will usually yield somewhere in the region of a pound of picked meat, which is a modest allowance for the six to eight the recipe claims. Trim the tough silverskin before cooking.
- Simmer, do not boilFour hours at a bare tremble is right; a rolling boil will tighten the muscle and cloud the liquor. The meat is ready when it falls apart under a fork with no springiness left.
- Keep the cooking liquorThe recipe omits it, but a few tablespoons of the reduced, strained broth stirred into the minced meat is what makes the loaf slice rather than crumble. Chill a spoonful first: it should set to a soft jelly. If it does not, reduce it further.
- Mince finelyChop by hand or pulse briefly in a processor. Overworking in a machine turns it to paste, which sets dense and pasty rather than shreddy.
- A quarter of a nutmegRoughly half a teaspoon grated. With a tablespoon of dried thyme this is a firmly spiced mixture by modern taste; season the warm meat and taste before pressing, since chilling mutes salt and pepper noticeably.
- The mould and weightA loaf tin or terrine lined with cling film works. Cover with a plate cut to fit inside the rim and weigh it with two or three tins of food, then refrigerate overnight. Press while the meat is still warm or it will not knit.
- KeepingBecause there is no butter seal, this is not a preserve. Keep it covered in the refrigerator and eat within three days; slice cold, with mustard, pickles and toast.
The price tells the story: sixpence a pound, at a time when prime beef cost roughly double that. Ox cheek was the classic economy braise of the Victorian kitchen, praised in household manuals for its gelatinous richness and slow to shake off its reputation as poor man's meat. Potting proper was a preservation method, meat pounded and sealed under a layer of clarified butter to keep for weeks; this version borrows the name but relies on nothing more than pressure and the cheek's own gelatine, producing what a later cook would call a brawn or a terrine. Its billing as a breakfast or supper dish reflects the shape of the nineteenth-century day, when both meals leaned on cold cuts from the sideboard, the substantial cooking having been done at dinner.