Home › The Principles of Cookery › TROUT, POTTED (another way)
TROUT, POTTED (another way)
Take six or eight fresh trout, cut off the heads, fins, and tails, empty the fish, split open and bone them. Lay them, backs uppermost, in a dish, and press them together. Tie the following spices in muslin. Half a tea-spoonful of peppercorns, a tea-spoonful of ginger, three salt-spoonfuls of salt, two bay-leaves, two cloves, three allspice, and a pinch of cayenne. Lay this bag upon the fish, with half a pound or more of good butter broken into pieces. Cover the dish closely, and put it into a gentle oven. When the fish are done enough, lift out the bag of seasoning, and set the trout in a cool airy place till wanted. Time to bake, an hour and a half.
A standard Victorian potting method: fish baked slowly under butter, then held at room temperature until wanted. The baking is sound; the keeping is where it fails.
- Why the cautionThe instruction is to bake the trout, leave the butter over them, and set the dish "in a cool airy place till wanted" — an open-ended ambient hold with no salt cure worth the name (three salt-spoonfuls, roughly three-quarters of a teaspoon, for six to eight fish) and no sealed, sterilised pot. Cooked fish sitting under fat is a low-oxygen environment at ambient temperature, which is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, and trout in particular carries type E strains that grow at cellar temperatures. Follow a current recipe for potted fish, which will tell you to refrigerate and to eat it within days.
- A "cool airy place"In an unheated Victorian larder this meant perhaps 45-55F for much of the year, and considerably warmer in summer. It is not equivalent to a refrigerator, and the recipe gives no limit on how long "till wanted" might be.
- Gentle ovenAround 300F (150C). At that heat an hour and a half is a long, low bake; boned trout of ordinary size are cooked through in a fraction of the time.
- Salt-spoonfulA salt-spoon was the smallest of the Victorian table spoons, generally taken as about a quarter teaspoon. Three of them is a seasoning quantity, not a preserving quantity, which is the crux of the problem above.
- A tea-spoonful of gingerThe recipe does not say whether this is ground ginger or bruised dried root; either could be tied in the muslin with the whole peppercorns, cloves and allspice.
- Half a pound of butterThe butter bastes the fish as it bakes and sets as it cools. Potting recipes often specify clarified butter where the fat is meant to seal, since the milk solids in whole butter spoil first — this one says only 'good butter broken into pieces'.
- Boning the troutSplitting and boning small trout is the fiddly part. The fish are laid backs (skin side) uppermost and pressed together so they hold their shape through the long bake.
Potting was the English answer to the problem of what to do with more fish, game or meat than a household could eat at once: cook it down, season it hard, pack it into a pot and cover it with a layer of fat that excluded the air. Trout, salmon, char and lampreys were all treated this way, and potted char from the Lake District was sent to London in its own shallow pots as a luxury by the eighteenth century. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s for large middle-class households running on a cool larder rather than mechanical refrigeration, prints several versions of the method as a matter of course. The spice mixture here — peppercorns, ginger, bay, clove, allspice, cayenne — is the standard English potting palette, tied in muslin so the flavour goes into the butter and the debris does not go into the fish. What the recipe does not include is a serious salt cure.