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Veal, Potted, Made with Fresh Meat
Take a thick slice of lean uncooked veal. Season with pounded mace or grated nutmeg and white pepper; put it into a potting-pan that will just hold it, pour cold water over, cover closely, and bake gently till quite tender. Let it get cold, cut it small, and pound it in a mortar till smooth. If to be used at once, quickly moisten with a little of its own gravy. If to be kept a short time, add a little clarified butter only. Press it into jars, and cover with melted butter or suet a quarter of an inch thick. Store in a cool, dry place. Time to bake the veal, three hours.
The cooking here is sound enough — lean veal seasoned and braised slowly under a tight lid — but the recipe is fundamentally a preserving method, and the preserving is where it fails. The points below explain the terms and then the hazard.
- What "potting" actually isThe butter or suet poured over the top to a quarter of an inch is not a garnish; it is an airtight seal, meant to exclude air so the meat keeps without ice. That seal creates exactly the oxygen-free environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin.
- Why "a cool, dry place" is the problemA larder was cool but nowhere near refrigeration temperature. Botulinum spores survive the three-hour bake comfortably, and the ambient storage this recipe assumes falls within the range in which they can grow once the butter has sealed out air. Nothing in the method — no acid, no measured salt or nitrite, no heat step after potting — blocks that. Butter-sealed meat pastes have been implicated in botulism outbreaks.
- No measured cureMace, nutmeg and white pepper are flavourings with no preservative effect at these levels. There is no weighed salt, no sugar, no vinegar and no stated curing agent, so there is no way to calculate whether the finished paste is safe to hold at all. An unmeasured preserve cannot be made safe by guesswork.
- Pounding raises the riskWorking the cooked meat smooth in a mortar, then moistening it with gravy, reintroduces surface bacteria throughout the mass and gives them a moist, low-acid, low-salt medium. Whole cooked meat under butter is a smaller target than a pounded paste.
- Terms, for reading the recipeA potting-pan is a straight-sided earthenware or metal pot chosen to fit the meat closely, so little liquid is needed. "Bake gently" indicates a slow oven; the recipe gives no temperature. Clarified butter is butter with the water and milk solids removed — the milk solids are what spoil, which is why the original specifies it.
- If you want potted vealUse a current, tested recipe for a cooked meat paste or rillette, follow its refrigeration and use-by instructions, and do not treat the butter cap as preservation. The historical instruction to store it in a larder should be read, not followed.
Potting was the English answer to the problem of meat that had to be eaten before it turned: cook it soft, pound it to a paste, pack it tight and cap it with fat so no air reached the surface. Recipes for potted beef, venison, salmon, lobster, shrimps and pigeons run right through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the potted-meat jar was a staple of the cold sideboard, the picnic hamper and the sandwich. This entry is for potted veal "made with fresh meat" — a reminder that potting was as much a way of using up as of laying down, since thriftier versions were made from leftover cooked joints. Veal was a common choice because it is pale, mild and gelatinous, so it pounded smooth and set firm; mace and nutmeg were the usual seasonings for pale potted meats. The whole practice belongs to the era before domestic refrigeration, when a cool larder and a fat seal were the best defence a household had, and it faded once the icebox and then the refrigerator made the trouble unnecessary.