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Pepper Pot, West Indian
In country houses where much company is kept, a difficulty is often experienced in disposing of the remains of poultry or game, and thus avoiding waste. The following dish may be recommended, as being palatable and convenient, and also a great favourite with those who have tried it. Procure a bottle of casaripe sauce. This sauce is sent from the West Indies. It is thick and dark in appearance, and is sold in quart bottles by most Italian warehousemen. Take whatever remains of meat or poultry you may have, cut them into convenient pieces, trim them neatly, put them into a pan, and cover them with the sauce. Make the whole hot over the fire, and take out as much as is required for immediate use. Put a further supply of game, etc., into the pot when there are any remains, remembering always to cover the additional meat with sauce, and to warm it each time it is used. The sauce will keep the meat quite good.
The dish itself — cooked meat simmered in cassareep — is genuine and still made in Guyana and the eastern Caribbean, but the method given here is a perpetual pot kept at room temperature and topped up indefinitely. That is the part that cannot be reproduced today.
- Why this version failsCooked poultry and game are held in an open pan between uses, warmed only "each time it is used," and fresh scraps are added on top of old. Nothing in the instructions brings the whole pot to a safe temperature or gets it out of the 40–140F range between meals, which is exactly the window in which Clostridium perfringens and Staphylococcus aureus multiply in cooked meat. A current recipe with measured cooking and cooling steps should be used instead.
- "The sauce will keep the meat quite good"Cassareep is dark, bitter and has long been reputed to be antiseptic, and West Indian cooks did rely on it, but it is not a measured cure. There is no salt percentage, no acidity figure and no holding temperature anywhere in the recipe, so there is nothing to verify.
- Casaripe / cassareepThe boiled-down juice of bitter cassava, reduced to a near-black syrup. The long boiling is not optional: raw bitter cassava juice contains cyanogenic glycosides, and only sustained heat drives them off. Bottled cassareep from a Caribbean grocer has already had this done and is a normal pantry item.
- Italian warehousemenVictorian shorthand for a high-end grocer dealing in imported oils, sauces and preserved goods — the ancestor of the delicatessen, not a specifically Italian shop.
- Quart bottlesAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 1.14 litres — noticeably larger than a US quart. Modern cassareep is usually sold in bottles of a few hundred millilitres.
- What the dish is without the potProperly, pepper pot is a stew: meat cooked from raw in cassareep with hot pepper, cinnamon, cloves and sugar, thickened and dark. Cassell's version is a leftovers strategy rather than the stew, which is why the seasoning is missing entirely.
Pepper pot is the best-known dish of Guyana and is generally traced to Amerindian cookery of the Guianas, where cassareep — bitter cassava juice boiled down until it keeps — was both flavouring and preservative. The pot lived at the back of the stove and was replenished rather than finished, a habit European visitors found remarkable and repeated often in print; particular family pots were claimed to be decades old. Cassell's places the dish under leftovers rather than under Caribbean cookery, which tells you how it reached the late-Victorian country house: as an imported bottled sauce sold by Italian warehousemen and said to keep meat good, useful in a household serving large shooting parties with no refrigeration and a daily surplus of cold game. The seasoning that makes real pepper pot — Scotch bonnet, cinnamon, clove, brown sugar — has dropped out of the account altogether, leaving only the preserving claim.