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Potted Meat Basket
Make some potted meat according to preceding recipe, and mould it to any desired shape. It must be put in the mould a little at a time and well pressed, that it may take the shape. The bottom must be made smooth by means of a palette knife, so that when turned out the meat may stand evenly on the dish. It must then be put in a cold place for a few hours, when it will turn out easily if loosened round the edge. The handle of the basket may be formed of a piece of flat cap wire, such as is used by milliners. It must be bent to shape and stuck firmly into the meat. This should be covered on both sides with curled butter, and the rim and base of the basket treated similarly. More butter may be put on to form the sides of the basket, and it may be garnished in many ways, according to taste. Cost uncertain.
This is a plating instruction rather than a cooking one: it assumes you already have a batch of potted meat from the preceding page and tells you how to turn it into a table centrepiece. The hinge is temperature — everything here depends on the meat and butter being properly cold and the room being cool.
- Start with a firm potted meatVictorian potted meat was pounded cooked meat bound with a good deal of clarified butter, which set hard when chilled. A modern pâté or rillette-style mixture that is loose at fridge temperature will not hold a moulded shape; you want a mixture stiff enough to resist a spoon straight from the refrigerator.
- "A cold place for a few hours"In a Victorian house this meant a larder or ice chest, appreciably cooler than a kitchen but well above modern refrigerator temperature. Use the refrigerator, and allow several hours or overnight. Chill the serving dish too, or the base softens while you are still applying butter.
- The mouldAny straight-sided or gently tapered vessel works: a loaf tin, a pudding basin, a small charlotte mould. Lining it with cling film rather than relying on loosening the edge with a knife gives a cleaner turn-out, and pressing the meat in a little at a time, as the recipe directs, packs it into the shape without leaving air pockets.
- Curled butterMade with a butter curler drawn across a chilled block, or scraped with a warmed teaspoon. Keep the curls in ice water until the moment of use and lift them out with a fork; handled with fingers they collapse. A piped butter border from a star tube is the easier modern equivalent.
- The millinery wire handleFlat cap wire was a fine flat wire wrapped in cotton or silk thread, and is not something to bury in food by current standards. If you want a handle, use stainless steel florist's wire or a thin wooden skewer, and treat it as a decoration to be removed before eating.
- Serving and yieldThe original gives none. As a rough guide, a basket moulded from about a pound of potted meat will do for a first course or buffet dish for a small party, with toast or thin dry biscuits. Bring it out of the refrigerator shortly before it goes to the table, not long in advance.
- "Cost uncertain"Cassell's usually gave a probable cost for a dish. Here it is left open, presumably because the quantity and kind of cooked meat used were not fixed.
Potted meats are one of the oldest forms of English preservation: cooked meat pounded to a paste, packed into a pot and sealed under a layer of clarified butter that excluded air. By the late nineteenth century the preserving function had become largely redundant, and potted meat survived mainly as a way of using up cold joints — which is why this entry treats it as raw material for decoration rather than as something worth preserving. The basket itself belongs to the high Victorian and Edwardian fashion for the buffet froid, where cold dishes were built up, moulded, and garnished into architecture; the same impulse produced aspic-lined charlottes, chaudfroid-glazed birds and butter piped into rosettes. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was aimed at households with a cook but not a French chef, and here the chef's effect is got with a mould, a palette knife and a length of hat wire from the milliner's.