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Veal, Marbled
Cut into thin slices a dried tongue which has been skinned and boiled in the usual way. Pound these in a mortar with a little butter and a seasoning of pepper and pounded mace. Mince and pound separately an equal weight with the tongue of cold roast veal, and season this with salt and cayenne. Spread a layer of the veal in the bottom of a potting-pan, put the tongue on it in large lumps, leaving a space between each lump, and fill up the empty spaces with veal. Press the meat closely into the pan. Pour clarified butter over to the thickness of half an inch, and keep the preparation in a cool place till wanted.
This is a potted meat — cooked veal and cured tongue pounded smooth, packed airless into a pot and sealed under a butter cap. The technique is sound in outline but the storage instruction is the problem, and the recipe gives no quantities, no salt weight and no temperature anywhere.
- Why the butter seal is the hazardA half-inch cap of clarified butter over pressed meat creates exactly the low-oxygen, low-acid environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin. Potted meats held at larder temperature are a historically documented cause of botulism, and the toxin gives no smell, taste or visible sign.
- "A cool place" is not a temperatureA Victorian larder or cellar would have varied with the season and the house, and could easily sit well above modern refrigeration. That is warm enough for growth over whatever period "till wanted" covers, and the original sets no limit on how long that is.
- No measured cureThe only preservatives here are the salt already in the tongue and whatever is added by eye. There is no stated salt percentage, no nitrite figure and no weight of meat, so nothing in the method can be checked against a modern safe threshold.
- The meat is never reheatedCold roast veal and boiled tongue are pounded, packed and sealed without any further cooking. Any contamination introduced during the pounding, packing or from the mortar goes straight into the sealed pot and stays there.
- Dried tongueThis means a salt-cured, air-dried ox tongue, soaked and long-boiled before use — not the fresh tongue a butcher sells today. The substitution changes the salt content of the finished pot entirely, which is another reason the original proportions cannot be carried across.
- Potting-pan and maceA potting-pan was generally a small straight-sided glazed earthenware or stoneware pot of the kind used for potted meats; the recipe says no more than that. Pounded mace is the dried aril that surrounds the nutmeg seed, ground; blade mace ground fresh is the nearest thing and is usually more aromatic than the pre-ground jar.
- If you want the dishMarbled potted meats are made now as a short-life refrigerated terrine, eaten within a few days. Follow a current recipe with stated weights and storage times rather than adapting this one.
Potting — pounding cooked meat with butter and spice, packing it into a jar and sealing it under fat — was one of the standard English methods of keeping cooked food before mechanical refrigeration, common in printed cookery from the seventeenth century onward and still a fixture of Victorian breakfast and supper tables. "Marbled" describes the appearance rather than any technique: the dark, salt-cured tongue is set in lumps within the pale veal so that a cut slice shows a mottled, stone-like grain, and the same trick was played with ham and chicken. Cassell's places it among the veal entries — the entry is titled "Veal, Marbled", and the placement may simply be alphabetical — and potting was the respectable way to make a second, more elegant meal out of cold roast veal. The taste for spiced, richly seasoned potted meat is often read as a survival of a much older English seasoning style, with mace and cayenne doing the work that a modern cook might give to herbs.