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Trout, Potted
Take six or eight moderate-sized fresh fish; scrape them, empty them, cut off the fins and heads, split them open, and remove the backbones. Mix three tea-spoonfuls of salt with an equal quantity of white pepper and a tea-spoonful of powdered mace, or half a nutmeg, grated. Rub a portion of this seasoning into the insides of the fish, close them, and place them in layers head to tail in a deep baking-dish, put little pieces of butter between the layers and on the top, and bake in a moderate oven. As soon as they are done enough, drain off the liquor in the pan, and lay the trout full-length in a potting-jar. When cold, cover them a quarter of an inch thick with clarified butter just beginning to stiffen, and set them in a cool place till wanted. Time to bake, about three-quarters of an hour. (See also GRILSE OR TROUT, TO POT.)
This is a preserving recipe, not simply a baked fish, and the preserving step is the problem. The seasoning and cooking are unremarkable; the sealed jar of butter kept "in a cool place till wanted" is what puts it out of reach.
- Why it fails: botulismCooked fish packed into a jar and sealed under a quarter-inch of butter is an oxygen-free, low-acid, low-salt environment held at ambient temperature — the exact conditions in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin. Type E strains are specifically associated with fish and grow at refrigerator temperatures as low as about 38F. The spores survive baking at any oven temperature.
- The salt does no preserving workThree teaspoons of salt rubbed inside six or eight fish is a seasoning level, well under one percent of the finished weight. Traditional potting recipes that kept for weeks relied on much heavier salting, deep pressing and a hard butter seal; this one relies chiefly on the cool larder, which most kitchens no longer have.
- "A cool place" meant something elseThe Victorian larder or cellar sat somewhere near 45-55F in winter and warmer in summer. Nothing in the recipe specifies a temperature or a keeping time, so there is no way to make it safe by following it more carefully. A current, tested recipe should be used instead.
- Not the same as refrigerated potted fishModern potted shrimp or potted mackerel sold chilled is made under controlled conditions and dated for a few days. That is a different product from a jar intended to sit until wanted.
- For reading: the ovenA "moderate oven" is conventionally read today as somewhere around 350F, though the recipe gives no temperature. Three-quarters of an hour at that heat for small split trout is far longer than modern practice, which would take a trout off the heat in a fraction of that time.
- For reading: the seasonings and vesselsMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and lighter than the nut itself; the recipe treats a teaspoon of it and half a grated nutmeg as interchangeable. A potting-jar was typically a straight-sided glazed earthenware pot, deep enough to take the fish full-length and narrow enough for the butter to seal edge to edge.
Potting was the English answer to the problem of a glut — a good catch, a killed pig, a brace of birds more than the household could eat fresh. The food was cooked hard, packed tight to exclude air, and capped with clarified butter, which sets firm and, having had its water and milk solids removed, does not readily go rancid. Potted trout, char and salmon were regional specialities of the lake and river districts; potted char from Windermere was sent to London in shallow decorated pots through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that trade is among the best-documented instances of potting we have. Cassell's places the entry in its general run of fish cookery alongside a cross-reference to grilse, the young salmon returning from the sea, which was potted by the same method. The technique survives in kitchens today only in its chilled, short-keeping form: potted shrimps, potted crab, a jar of rillettes under fat, eaten within days rather than laid down for the season.