Home › The Principles of Cookery › SALMON, POTTED (Cold Meat Cookery)
SALMON, POTTED (Cold Meat Cookery)
Take the remains of cold salmon. Free the fish from skin and bone, then pound it thoroughly in a mortar. Whilst pounding keep adding clarified butter--a few drops at a time--together with salt, cayenne, powdered mace, and a little anchovy. When the preparation is moist, smooth, and pleasantly flavoured, press it into small jars, and pour over it clarified butter to the thickness of a quarter of an inch. Put it in a cool place for twelve hours, when it will be ready for use.
A Victorian way of using up leftover poached salmon, and still one of the best. The original gives no quantities at all, so the working ratio and the storage rule are what need filling in.
- The hinge: butter is flavour, not preservationThe hinge: the butter seal is not a preservative -- The quarter-inch butter seal was meant to exclude air in a cold larder, and it does not make the potted fish shelf-stable by modern standards. Keep the jars refrigerated and eat within three or four days.
- Working proportionsFor every 8 oz (225 g) cooked salmon allow roughly 3 oz (85 g) clarified butter for the paste and another 2 oz (55 g) melted for the seal. Season with about 1/4 teaspoon powdered mace, a good pinch of cayenne, and 1 teaspoon anchovy paste or essence.
- Clarified butterMelt unsalted butter gently, skim the foam, and pour off the clear fat leaving the milky solids behind. The milk solids are what would sour a sealed pot, so leave them in the pan.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but pulse rather than run it — salmon turns pasty and gluey if overworked. Add the butter in a thin stream with the machine going, as the original says, a little at a time.
- "A little anchovy"Cassell's readers would have reached for anchovy essence or pounded salted anchovy. Anchovy paste from a tube is the direct equivalent; start small, as it carries a lot of salt as well as savour.
- MaceMace is the outer lace of the nutmeg, milder and more floral than the nut itself, and it is the seasoning that makes this taste period rather than modern. Ground nutmeg substitutes at about two-thirds the quantity.
- "A cool place for twelve hours"The refrigerator. The rest is not idle — the butter has to set firm and the mace and cayenne need time to come forward through the fat.
- Yield and serving8 oz of salmon fills two 1/2-cup ramekins and serves four to six as a starter. Let it stand 20 minutes out of the fridge before serving so the butter softens, and give it hot toast and lemon.
Potting was the standard English answer to a surplus of cooked meat or fish long before refrigeration: pound it fine, bind it with clarified butter, and cap it with more butter to keep the air out. Salmon, ham, shrimps, tongue and game were all treated the same way, and potted salmon and potted shrimps were common breakfast and supper dishes in Victorian households. Cassell's files this under "Cold Meat Cookery," a whole department of nineteenth-century cookbooks devoted to the second life of a joint or a fish — a section that reflects both genuine thrift and the sheer size of the dishes coming out of a well-off kitchen. Mace, cayenne and anchovy are the classic potting seasonings of the period, the anchovy standing in for the savoury depth that a modern cook might look for in soy or Worcestershire sauce.