Home › The Principles of Cookery › Poultry, Potted
Poultry, Potted
Poultry may either be potted whole or cut into neat joints and potted, or the flesh may be picked from the meat and pounded before it is put into the jars. In any case the meat must be thickly covered with butter, or it will not keep. When the meat is not pounded, the joints must be packed together as closely as possible, or they will require a good deal of butter. Birds which are boned and stuffed are excellent potted; they must be quite fresh, must be carefully cleaned, nicely seasoned, baked, and quite cold before they are put into the jars, and the butter must be clarified before it is poured over them. If the meat is to be kept, the jar should be covered with bladder and tied down closely. Potted chicken is improved by pounding a little fat and lean ham with the meat.
This is a method rather than a fixed recipe, and the method is the problem: it is a room-temperature preserving technique for low-acid meat with no measured salt, no measured temperature and no stated keeping time. The notes below explain the terms and why the procedure fails modern food-safety practice.
- Why this cannot be made as writtenCooked poultry sealed under a thick layer of butter and tied down is an anaerobic, low-acid, low-salt environment held at cellar temperature — the classic conditions for Clostridium botulinum to germinate and produce toxin. Nothing in the instructions controls for it: there is no cure, no measured salt, no acidification and no refrigeration.
- The seal is the hazard, not the protectionThe butter cap and bladder cover were understood as barriers against air and mould, and they do exclude oxygen effectively. That is precisely what makes the interior hospitable to the anaerobes that matter, while spoilage organisms that would have warned the cook by smell or appearance are suppressed. Botulinum toxin gives no taste, smell or visible sign.
- Potted meats have a documented recordPotted game and poultry pastes of this construction were implicated in British botulism cases in the twentieth century, the best known being the fatal 1922 Loch Maree poisoning, traced to potted wild duck paste. The episode is usually credited with sharpening attention to the hazards of potted meat.
- Boned and stuffed birds make it worseThe recipe's favoured version — a boned, stuffed bird, baked, cooled and buried in butter — puts the stuffing at the thermal centre of a dense mass of meat. It is the slowest part to heat and the slowest to cool, and it is then sealed away from air for an unstated period.
- No quantities to work fromThere is no weight of salt, no ratio of butter to meat, no oven temperature, no baking time and no keeping period. Even setting the microbiology aside, the text gives nothing that could be scaled or verified; "nicely seasoned" is the whole of the cure.
- Terms in the textTo "pot" here is to pack cooked meat into a jar and seal it under fat. "Bladder" is a pig or ox bladder, soaked soft and stretched over the jar mouth as a skin that dried tight — a common covering before waxed paper and screw lids. Clarified butter is butter with the milk solids and water removed, which is the likely reason the recipe insists on it: the solids would sour.
- If you want potted chickenUse a current recipe. Modern versions treat potted meat as a short-life refrigerated spread, not a preserve, and that is a different procedure from the one described here.
Potting might be thought of as the English counterpart to the French confit and terrine: cooked meat, poultry or fish packed into a glazed jar and sealed under fat, kept in a cool larder and sent as a present or carried on a journey. It was a general household skill applied to whatever was to hand — chicken, pigeon, game, tongue, shrimps, salmon — and the Cassell's entry reads as a set of rules for all of them: pack tight to save butter, clarify the butter, cool the meat completely, cover thickly. The addition of pounded fat and lean ham to potted chicken is the same instinct that gives modern chicken liver parfait its seasoning, supplying salt and colour to pale, mild flesh. The confidence of the instructions is a measure of the period: a late Victorian cook was expected to keep meat for weeks in a cool room and to judge by eye and nose whether it had turned. Botulism was not identified as a hazard of home-preserved meat in Britain until the 1920s.