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Salmon, Potted
Scale and dry a fresh salmon. Slit it down the back, take out the bone, and mix some grated nutmeg, mace, pepper, and salt, and strew it over the fish. Let it lie two or three hours; then lay it in a large pot or pan, put to it half a pound of butter, and bake for an hour. When done, lay it to drain; then cut it up, and put the pieces in layers, with the skin uppermost, in pots; place a board over the pots, and lay on it a weight to press the salmon down till cold: then take the board and weight off, and pour clarified butter over the fish. Salmon potted in this way may be sent to table in pieces or cut into slices.
This is a preserving recipe rather than a supper dish: the whole point of the clarified butter cap is to keep the fish edible for weeks in a cool larder. That is where it fails by current standards, and the failure is not a matter of adjusting an oven setting.
- The butter seal is the hazardPouring clarified butter over cooked fish and letting it set creates an oxygen-free layer over a low-acid, moist, protein-rich food. Those are precisely the conditions in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin, and the toxin is odourless and tasteless.
- Baking does not steriliseAn hour in the oven kills the bacteria present but not the heat-resistant spores. The recipe then removes the fish's competition, seals out air and, in its original context, stores the pots at larder temperature. Nothing in the method brings the sealed pot to a temperature or pressure that would destroy spores.
- No measured cureThe salt and spice are strewn on by eye and much of the salt drains away with the liquor before potting. There is no measured brine strength, no nitrite, no acidification and no recorded storage temperature, so there is no way to say the product sits in a safe range.
- Pressing makes it worse, not betterThe board and weight are there to exclude air pockets and give a solid block that slices. Compacting the fish deepens the anaerobic zone at the centre of the pot.
- Not an ordinary kitchen riskHot fat and a sharp knife are risks a cook manages. Botulinum toxin is not detectable by look or smell and is not neutralised by the way potted fish is served, which is cold and unheated. If you want potted salmon, use a current recipe with stated refrigeration and a short, specified keeping time.
- Reading the original"Pots" here means small straight-sided jars, filled high so the butter can cap them; "clarified butter" is butter melted and the milk solids strained off, which is what allows it to set hard and airtight. No oven temperature is given, as was usual in recipes of this date.
- Half a pound of butterThat is 8 oz, roughly 225 g, and it is not seasoning: it renders out with the fish juices and is meant to be drained off before the flesh is packed. The clarified butter poured over at the end is a separate quantity the recipe never specifies.
Potting was the standard British answer to a glut of fish or game before reliable ice, and salmon was its most famous subject. The pot of pressed pink fish under a yellow butter cap was a familiar item on Georgian and Victorian breakfast and supper tables. The seasoning here utmeg, mace, pepper, salt is the conservative English potting mixture that had barely changed since the seventeenth century, and mace in particular was often said to help keep as well as flavour. Potting demonstrates a technique rather than a single dish: the same sequence of season, bake, drain, press and seal was applied to beef, tongue, shrimps, char and pigeons. Tinned and bottled fish are generally credited with displacing the home-potted jar, and the method survives today mainly as a short-keeping refrigerated spread.