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Partridges, Potted
Prepare and truss the partridges as if for roasting, and season them inside and out with pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Put a piece of fresh butter, the size of a large egg, inside the birds, and pack them, breast downwards, closely together in a pie-dish. Place three or four pieces of butter upon them, cover the dish with a coarse paste, made of flour and water, and bake them in a moderate oven. Do not remove the covering until the dish is quite cold; then take out the birds, free them entirely from gravy, cut them into convenient-sized pieces, and pack them as closely as possible in a potting-jar, cover with clarified butter, and store in a cool place. Time, one hour to bake the partridges. Probable cost, 3s. per brace. Sufficient for four or five persons.
This is a preserving recipe, not simply a baked dish, and the preserving step is the part that fails modern standards. The notes below explain the specific problems and the vocabulary of the original.
- Why the storage is unsafeCooked meat packed tight and sealed under a layer of clarified butter is a low-acid, oxygen-free environment. That is precisely the condition in which Clostridium botulinum spores, which survive the one hour of baking, can germinate and produce toxin. A Victorian "cool place" was a stone larder at a temperature that does nothing to prevent this.
- No measured cureUnlike a proper cure, there is no salt-to-meat ratio, no nitrite, no stated storage temperature and no stated keeping time — only pepper, salt "to season" and nutmeg. Nothing here controls bacterial growth; the butter seal is a barrier to air and mould, not a preservative. If you want potted game, follow a current tested recipe with defined refrigeration and a short use-by window.
- Handling the birds coldThe instruction to leave the paste-sealed dish untouched "until the dish is quite cold" means the meat spends hours cooling slowly in its own fat and juices inside a sealed vessel, then is jointed by hand at room temperature. Both stages sit in the range where contamination multiplies.
- "A coarse paste"A flour-and-water lid of the kind also called huff paste or luting paste. It was generally not intended for the table: it served as a disposable cover that sealed in steam and was broken off and discarded, doing the job a foil cover does now.
- "A moderate oven"Usually read today as somewhere around 350F, though Victorian ovens were not calibrated and the term was judged by feel. The one-hour time given is for the baking stage only and says nothing about the safety of what follows.
- Butter "the size of a large egg"Conventionally about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons; the recipe says only that such a piece goes inside the birds, with more dotted on top. Clarified butter for the final seal means butter with the milk solids and water removed — the solids are what would spoil first.
- Sourcing partridgeGrey and red-legged partridge are shot game with legal seasons in Britain and are farmed or imported elsewhere; a brace means two birds. The "3s. per brace" is Victorian pricing and should not be read across to modern costs.
Potting was one of the standard English ways of carrying game beyond its short season before reliable refrigeration: the flesh was cooked, packed into a stoneware jar and sealed under a cap of clarified butter that kept out air and mould. Potted game, char, shrimps and beef appear all through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century household books, and by Cassell's day the potting jar was a fixture of the country larder — useful for the surplus from a day's shooting, and for breakfast and shooting-luncheon sandwiches. The technique also lies behind the modern potted shrimp, which persists partly because it is now made and sold under refrigeration.