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Swan, Potted
Skin the swan, and take out all the bones; cut the flesh into small pieces, and pound them in a mortar. Pound also with them some clean fat bacon, adding a little at a time. Beat this up with the flesh of the swan, so as to incorporate the two like an amalgam. When the mass has assumed a light flesh-colour, no more bacon need be added. Continue to beat the meat until it is of the consistency of dough. Season it with salt, pepper, cloves, mace, and nutmeg, all finely powdered and well mixed and beaten up with it. Put the mass now into a baking-pan with a good glassful of port wine and the same quantity of water; cover the top with two pounds of cold fresh butter. Cover the pan with a coarse paste of flour and water. Bake it in an oven heated as for bread. When it is done, take off the crust, turn out the meat into a dish, and having gently squeezed the moisture out of it, put it into pots. When cold pour over it clarified butter.
This is a genuine recipe — a potted meat of the old huff-paste school — but it cannot be made lawfully or safely now. The notes below explain what stands in the way and what the instructions meant when they were written.
- The bird itselfMute swans in Britain are protected, with unmarked birds on open water traditionally held to belong to the Crown; in the United States the native tundra and trumpeter swans are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, though mute swans, as an introduced species, are not federally protected, and a few states license limited swan hunting by permit. In practice there is no ordinary route to the main ingredient.
- Potting as preservationThe point of the butter seal is long keeping at cellar temperature. A dense, low-acid meat paste held anaerobic under fat is a textbook environment for Clostridium botulinum, and the recipe gives no cure, no measured salt and no storage temperature. If you want potted poultry, follow a current recipe with refrigeration and a stated shelf life.
- The bacon is structuralPounding fat bacon into lean flesh "like an amalgam" until the mass turns pale is not seasoning but binding: the fat carries the pounded fibre and keeps the potted mass from setting hard and dry. The colour change is the cue for when to stop adding bacon; the dough-like consistency is the cue for when the pounding is done.
- "An oven heated as for bread"A bread oven was fired, raked clear and loaded on falling heat: hot at the start and drifting down through a long bake. The book gives neither a temperature nor a time.
- The coarse paste is not foodThe flour-and-water covering is a huff paste, a disposable lid that seals in steam and is broken off and discarded. It is why the instruction says to take off the crust rather than serve it.
- Vague measures"A good glassful" of port is genuinely unfixed — a Victorian wineglass was commonly reckoned at about 2 fl oz, while a tumbler would be considerably more. Two pounds of butter over the top, plus more clarified butter to finish, suggests a large-household preparation meant to fill several pots.
Swan was a display bird rather than everyday meat: a Christmas and civic-feast centrepiece in England from the medieval period onward, its ownership regulated by royal swanmarks and swan-upping long before it became a matter of wildlife law. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century the entry was already close to antiquarian — a record of what great kitchens had once done with a tough, dark, strongly flavoured old bird, which is exactly the sort of flesh that rewards pounding to a paste with fat and warm spice. Potting itself was the standard English answer to any meat that needed to keep: pound, season heavily, bake sealed under butter, then seal again with clarified butter in stoneware pots. The same method survives in potted beef, potted hare and the potted shrimps still sold today, all descendants of a technique that mattered when a household bought or killed in bulk and had months, not days, to eat the result.