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TURKEY, POTTED (another way)
Cut the flesh from a cold roast turkey, and free it from skin and sinew. Weigh it, mince finely, and pound it in a mortar to a smooth paste with one-fourth of its weight in grated tongue or ham, and an equal weight of fresh butter; whilst pounding the meat keep adding salt, pepper, and powdered mace in small quantities at a time till it is pleasantly and rather highly seasoned. When the meat is quite smooth, press it into small pots, and cover with clarified butter a quarter of an inch deep. Store in a cool place. Time, three-quarters of an hour or more to prepare.
A leftovers dish from the era before refrigeration, when a sealed pot of buttered meat paste was both economy and store-cupboard insurance. It still makes excellent potted meat, provided you treat it as a fresh preparation rather than a preserve.
- Treat it as fresh, not preservedA layer of clarified butter over cooked meat creates exactly the low-oxygen environment that Clostridium botulinum favours, and a Victorian larder was a good deal warmer than a refrigerator. Keep the pots refrigerated from the moment they are filled and eat within three or four days; do not use this as a shelf-stable store.
- The butter proportion is ambiguous"an equal weight of fresh butter" can be read as equal to the turkey or equal to the quarter-weight of tongue. Other potted-meat recipes of the period often work out at something in the region of a quarter butter to meat, so the tongue-weight reading is the safer one; butter equal to the turkey gives something closer to a spreadable emulsion than a paste.
- Mortar workThe recipe allows three-quarters of an hour or more for the whole preparation; the pounding itself is a couple of minutes' work in a food processor. Have the butter soft but not melted and pulse rather than run continuously, or friction warms the mixture and it separates when it cools.
- Grated tongueSalt ox tongue was a familiar item in better-off Victorian households and supplied both salt and colour. Cooked ham, or a piece of good gammon, does the same job; if you use ham, hold back on the added salt until you have tasted.
- MaceBlade mace ground fine, not nutmeg. It is the outer casing of the same seed but milder and more floral, and it is the flavour that makes a potted meat taste Victorian. Start at about a quarter teaspoon per pound of meat.
- Clarified butterMelt butter gently, skim the foam, and pour off the clear fat leaving the milky solids behind. Milk solids in the seal will sour and spoil the top of the pot. Pour it over cold, firmly pressed meat so it sets as a clean cap.
- Seasoning cold foodThe instruction to season "rather highly" is sound. The mixture is eaten cold and heavily fatted, both of which mute salt and spice; season to a point that tastes slightly aggressive while the paste is still at room temperature.
- YieldA pound of picked turkey meat with its tongue and butter fills two or three small pots, to be served as a starter or sandwich filling with toast.
Potting is one of the oldest English methods of keeping cooked meat: the flesh is pounded fine, packed to exclude air, and sealed under a cap of fat, a technique documented in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onwards and applied to everything from beef and venison to shrimps, char and woodcock. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century, the preserving function mattered less than the thrift: this is explicitly a second recipe for using up the carcass of a cold roast turkey, a bird that in households that could afford one appeared at Christmas and then had to be got through. The addition of tongue or ham is a standard trick for giving pale poultry the salt and colour it lacks, and mace recurs very often in potted meats of the period.