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SALMON, POTTED (another way)
Both cooked and uncooked salmon may be potted. We first give a recipe for potting fresh salmon. Take a piece of salmon weighing about two pounds. Skin and clean it thoroughly; do not wash it, but wipe it with a dry cloth. Cut it into slices, and rub these with salt, then let them drain until dry. Season with a table-spoonful of white, pepper, half a salt-spoonful of cayenne, and half a salt-spoonful of powdered mace. Lay the salmon in a jar, cover it with four ounces of butter, and bake in a slow oven. When it is done enough, pour off the gravy--which will be found useful for flavouring purposes--press the salmon into jars, and when cold cover it with butter which has been clarified and is just beginning to set. If liked, a bay-leaf, a finely-minced onion, and one or two anchovies may be laid between the pieces of salmon in the jar. Time to bake, one hour and a half. Probable cost, salmon, when plentiful, 1s. to 1s. 4d. per pound.
This is a preserve, not a dish for the day it is made: the whole point of the butter cap is to keep air off the fish so the pot can sit in a larder for weeks. That is precisely where it fails by current food-safety standards, and the failure is not one that better technique fixes.
- The butter seal is the problemFat poured over cooked fish and left to set creates an oxygen-free layer, which is the exact condition Clostridium botulinum requires to germinate and produce toxin. Type E strains are specifically associated with fish and can grow at refrigerator temperatures, so chilling the pot does not remove the risk.
- No cure worth the nameThe salt is rubbed on and the slices drained; nothing is measured and nothing is left in the flesh in a known concentration. Commercially potted fish relies on measured salt, controlled water activity, pH or heat processing to make anaerobic storage safe. None of that is present here.
- No storage instruction at allThe original says only "when cold cover it with butter" and stops. There is no shelf life, no storage temperature, and no indication of when the pot should be discarded, which is the reader's whole safety margin.
- Slow oven, unknown internal temperatureA Victorian slow oven is usually reckoned at somewhere around 250-300F, and an hour and a half should cook a two-pound piece of salmon through. But the recipe then re-handles the cooked fish, presses it into fresh jars and seals it, reintroducing bacteria after the only heat step.
- The reserved gravyThe recipe recommends keeping the drained cooking liquid "for flavouring purposes." That is a protein-rich fish stock with no stated storage method; treat it as you would any fresh fish stock rather than as a pantry item.
- Reading the old measuresA salt-spoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so the cayenne and mace amount to a scant pinch each against a full tablespoon of white pepper -- an unusually pepper-forward seasoning. Four ounces of butter is one stick. The price given is a shilling to sixteen pence a pound, and the recipe specifies that this is when salmon is plentiful.
- If you want potted salmonUse a current, tested recipe intended for refrigerated short-term storage, or a properly processed commercial product. Do not adapt this one.
Potting was one of the ways an English household dealt with a surplus of perishable protein before canning became domestic: the flesh was cooked, packed tight into an earthenware pot to exclude air, and capped with clarified butter, which sets hard and keeps out both oxygen and dust. Salmon, along with char from the Lakeland meres, shrimps from Morecambe Bay and beef and game, was among the classic subjects. The quoted price, a shilling or so a pound "when plentiful," is a reminder that river salmon was seasonal, and potting was one way a household absorbed a catch it could not eat at once. What the Victorians did not know, and could not have known, is that the airless environment they were creating on purpose is the one in which botulinum toxin forms, a connection not understood until bacteriology caught up with the larder around the turn of the twentieth century.