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Perch, Potted
Take ten or twelve moderate-sized perch. Empty them, take out the gills, skin them, and cut off the heads, tails, and fins. Put the fish into a pie-dish that will only just hold them when they are closely packed, sprinkle a little salt over them, and lay on them a muslin bag containing the following ingredients, which have been crushed to powder. Eight pepper-corns, two chillies, four allspice, half an inch of ginger, a bay-leaf, and a laurel-leaf. Put ten ounces of fresh butter, cut into slices, upon the fish, cover it closely, and bake in a gentle oven. When done, lift out the bag, and keep the fish in a cool place until wanted. Serve cold. Time to bake, two hours. Probable cost, uncertain, perch being seldom offered for sale. Sufficient for ten or twelve persons.
This is a Victorian potted fish, and two things in it put it outside what a modern cook should reproduce: the flavouring and the storage method. The notes below explain the terms and then the problems.
- The laurel-leaf is the reason to stopThe laurel-leaf is the reason for caution -- Cassell's lists a bay-leaf and a laurel-leaf as separate items, which in nineteenth-century British usage most likely means the second is cherry laurel, Prunus laurocerasus. Its leaves were used as a cheap substitute for bitter almond, and crushing them releases hydrogen cyanide — exactly what this recipe directs. There is no reliable household dose, and no way to know the concentration in a given leaf.
- Potting under butterTen ounces of butter poured over closely packed fish in a covered dish creates an oxygen-free layer over a low-acid, high-moisture food. That is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, and the recipe gives no salt weight, no acidification and no storage temperature — a Victorian "cool place" is not refrigeration. A current, tested recipe should be used if you want potted fish.
- What "a gentle oven" meantA gentle or slow oven is the bottom of the range, commonly glossed as roughly 275–300F in modern terms, though the book itself gives no temperatures. Two hours at that heat is a long, slow bake; it is not a food-safety failure in itself, but it also does nothing to make the storage method above acceptable.
- Perch, and why the price is "uncertain"European perch (Perca fluviatilis) was an angler's fish rather than a market fish, which is why the book cannot quote a cost. It has tough, adherent scales and sharp dorsal spines, which may be why the recipe directs skinning rather than scaling.
- The spice bagEight peppercorns, two chillies, four allspice berries, half an inch of ginger and a bay-leaf, crushed and tied in muslin: assertive, warm, no fresh herbs. The laurel is the outlier, and was likely there for an almond note rather than for savour.
- ScaleTen or twelve perch, said to serve ten or twelve people, works out at one fish per person; the book calls them "moderate-sized". They are served cold.
Potting — cooking a food slowly with butter, then sealing it under more butter — was the standard English larder technique for fish, game and cheese before reliable canning, and it survives in potted shrimps and potted beef. Perch appears here rather than in a fishmonger's list because it was caught, not bought: Cassell's own note that it is "seldom offered for sale" places it among the river fish that reached the table through the household's own rod. The laurel-leaf is a telling period detail. Cherry laurel leaves appear in British recipe books through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, giving custards, creams and potted goods an almond flavour, though they were also increasingly warned against, and laurel water was a recognised poison in the same period; the well-known laurel-water experiments and reports date from the earlier eighteenth century, but the practice persisted in print long after, as this entry shows.