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PARTRIDGES, POTTED (another way)
Pick the meat from the remains of cold roast partridges, which have been well dressed. Remove all the skin and gristle, mince the meat finely, and pound it in a mortar. Add, every now and then, a small quantity of fresh butter, and season with salt, cayenne, and grated nutmeg. When the meat is quite smooth, press it into small jars, cover with dissolved butter, and store in a cool place. About two ounces and a half of butter will be required for each half pound of meat. Time, forty minutes to roast the partridges. Probable cost, 3s. per brace.
A leftovers recipe: the point is to turn the picked carcasses of a brace of roast partridges into a smooth, well-seasoned paste. Two things decide whether it works — the butter ratio and the fineness of the pounding.
- The butter ratioTwo and a half ounces of butter to half a pound of meat is 5 oz per pound, about a third of the meat's weight in butter, and that is what makes the paste spreadable rather than dry and crumbly. Weigh the picked meat before you start rather than adding butter by eye.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does in two minutes what the mortar did in twenty. Pulse the cold meat first, then add the butter in pieces with the motor running until it is genuinely smooth; if it looks grainy, keep going, because the texture is the whole dish.
- "Dissolved butter" means clarified"Dissolved butter" -- the book means melted butter, but clarified is better for a seal: melt butter gently and pour off the clear yellow fat, leaving the milky solids behind, since whole melted butter seals badly and the milk solids sour first. Pour it over the packed potted meat to a depth of about a quarter inch.
- Storage, not preservationA butter seal in a Victorian larder was a preserving technique; treat it now as nothing more than a lid. Refrigerate the jars and eat within three or four days. Do not keep potted game at room temperature, and do not scale this up as a store-cupboard preserve.
- Seasoning cold foodSeason more assertively than you would a hot dish, and taste after the butter is in — fat mutes salt and cayenne. Grate the nutmeg fresh and use it sparingly; it should sit behind the game, not in front of it.
- The roasting timeForty minutes is for the whole bird before it became leftovers. If you are roasting partridge specifically for this, 20-25 minutes at 425F is enough for modern taste; overcooked breast turns dry and pounds up woolly.
- YieldA brace of partridges gives something in the region of half a pound of picked meat, enough to fill a couple of small ramekins or one small jar and to serve as a starter for four with hot toast. "3s. per brace" is the shilling price of the birds and is only of historical interest.
Potting was the standard English answer to cooked meat that would otherwise be wasted: pound it fine, work in butter, pack it airtight under more butter, and the fat seal kept air off the surface. Cassell's gives the method for a range of meats and fish, and this partridge version is explicitly a second-day dish, built on "the remains of cold roast partridges." Game rather than butcher's meat here is telling of the book's readership: partridge came into a house by shooting or by the poulterer in season, and a brace priced at three shillings was a considerable item to leave on the bone. The technique belongs to the same tradition as the potted shrimps and coarse-textured meat pastes still sold under a butter cap, though those now rely on refrigeration for the safety the butter was once trusted to provide.