Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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PHEASANT, POTTED (another way)
Pick the meat from a cold roast pheasant, mince it finely, and pound in a mortar to a smooth paste; put the bones into a stewpan with a quart of strong stock, two ounces of lean ham, three shallots, two table-spoonfuls of sherry, two table-spoonfuls of mushroom ketchup, a bunch of parsley, a small sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, and a dozen peppercorns. Boil this down quickly until it is reduced to a glaze (see GLAZE), then strain through a fine hair-sieve, and mix with the meat. Add five or six ounces of clarified butter, and a little salt, and cayenne. Pound these ingredients together, and press the mixture into small potting-jars. Pour over the contents clarified butter to the thickness of half an inch, and store in a cool, dry place. Probable cost, 4s., with pheasants at 3s. each.
This is a potted meat intended for storage at room temperature under a butter seal, and that is precisely the problem. The notes below explain the hazard and decode the archaic terms; they are not a route to making it.
- The butter seal is the hazardHalf an inch of clarified butter poured over the surface excludes air, which is the whole point of potting. It also creates exactly the oxygen-free environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate in low-acid meat. The toxin is odourless, tasteless, and does not spoil the appearance of the pot.
- No process step at allThe meat is picked from an already-roasted bird, pounded cold, mixed with a cold glaze and cold butter, and packed. Nothing in the sequence brings the filled jar to any temperature that would destroy spores, and low-acid meat cannot be made safe by boiling-water processing in any case.
- "A cool, dry place" is not refrigerationA Victorian larder ran perhaps 10-15C, well inside the growth range for the organism. The recipe gives no keeping time, no temperature and no acid, salt or nitrite level that could be checked, which is why it cannot be corrected by adjusting a number.
- Pounding spreads contaminationThe mortar work distributes any surface organisms from the roast bird, the ham and the handling right through the paste, and the reduced glaze adds a further cooled-and-held ingredient. If you want potted game today, use a current recipe treating it as a fresh refrigerated product with a short, stated shelf life.
- Mushroom ketchupNot a tomato product. It is a thin, dark, salty liquor of salted mushrooms, closer to a mushroom soy or Worcestershire sauce, and was a standard savoury seasoning in nineteenth-century British kitchens.
- GlazeThe book's cross-reference is to meat glaze: stock boiled down until it sets to a firm, sticky, syrupy jelly on cooling. A quart reducing to a glaze means losing roughly nine-tenths of the volume.
- The costing"4s." is four shillings, and the recipe prices pheasants at three shillings each, so the bird is the bulk of the cost. Potting a roast bird already cooked was one way of carrying it on beyond the day it was served.
Potting is one of the oldest English methods of keeping cooked meat: the flesh is pounded with butter, packed into a jar, and sealed with more butter, a technique documented in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward for beef, venison, char, shrimps and game birds. Game potted particularly well because shooting arrived in gluts, and a brace of pheasants killed in October had to be made useful over weeks rather than days. By the time Cassell's was compiled, potted meats had also become a commercial product sold in stoneware and glass pots, and the "another way" heading here may suggest that the domestic version was still common enough to warrant several treatments, though the formula was a common editorial one. The recipe's confidence about storage reflects the state of knowledge before the bacteriology of the 1890s and after: cooks can be presumed to have understood that air caused meat to go off and that butter kept air out, but the organism that thrives without air was not yet part of the picture.