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Venison, Beef Potted in Imitation Of
Put eight or ten pounds of lean beef into a deep dish, pour a pint of wine over it, and let it lie for two days, seasoning well with mace, pepper, salt, and a clove of garlic; then lay it in a closely-covered pot along with the wine--add another glassful if there is not enough--and bake for three hours in a quick oven. When cold, pound the meat to a paste, and pot in the usual way.
A Victorian potted meat that leans on a long wine marinade and mace to mimic the muskiness of game. Two things need translating: the oven, and the fact that the original assumes a cold larder and a butter seal.
- The hinge: keep it cold, and eat it soonMarinate in the refrigerator, not at room temperature, and treat the finished paste as a fresh product — refrigerated and eaten within three or four days, or frozen. Potted meat sealed under butter and kept in a cool cupboard is exactly the low-oxygen, ambient-temperature situation modern food safety advice warns against, whatever "the usual way" meant to a Victorian cook.
- "A quick oven" needs reinterpretingA quick oven is 425–450F, but three hours at that heat in a modern, well-sealed oven will scorch the pot and dry the beef. The intent is a long, closed, moist braise: 300–325F for three hours in a covered casserole gives the result the writer expected from a falling coal-fired oven.
- Quantities of wineAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, roughly 2.5 US cups; the extra "glassful" is unmeasured, though a Victorian wineglassful was commonly reckoned at about 2 fl oz. The recipe does not say which wine; a dry red suits the intention here.
- The seasoning is left to youNo amounts are given. For 8 lb of beef, about 2 tablespoons fine salt works out at roughly 1 percent of the meat's weight (nearer 1/4 cup if you want 1.5 percent), 1–2 teaspoons ground mace, 2 teaspoons black pepper, and the single clove of garlic as written. Season the paste again after pounding, since cold food tastes flatter.
- Cut of beef"Lean beef" here means a working muscle that will shred after long braising — shin, top round, or lean chuck. Very lean cuts pound into a dry, fibrous paste, so keep the cooking liquid to moisten it.
- Pounding, in practiceA food processor does in a minute what a mortar did in twenty. Pulse the cold meat with a few spoonfuls of the strained cooking liquid and some softened butter until it holds together; fully smooth is a matter of taste.
- YieldEight to ten pounds of beef makes several pounds of potted paste, depending on how much liquid and butter you work back in — a Victorian household quantity. A quarter of the recipe, about 2 lb of beef, fills two or three small jars and is a more sensible modern batch.
Potting was the English answer to keeping cooked meat before refrigeration: pound it fine, press it into a jar, and seal the surface with clarified butter to shut out air. "In imitation of venison" points to something else, though: venison came from deer parks, and though it could be bought by the later nineteenth century, a joint of it carried social weight that beef did not. Cooks responded with dishes that borrowed the flavour: a long steep in wine and heavy spicing with mace and pepper approximates the gamey, slightly high character that hung venison had by the time it reached the kitchen. Cassell's, compiled for Victorian middle-class households that aspired upward, is full of these imitations — mock venison, mock game sauces — and they say as much about the period's appetite for gentry food as about the food itself. Read next The Nature of Foods The Why and the Wherefore of Boiling, Grilling, and Frying Tomato Salad Posset, Sack