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Venison, Potted
Place the venison in a pan, pour red wine over it, add to it a pound of butter; put a paste over the pan, and set it in the oven to bake. When done enough, take the meat out of the gravy, beat it well with the butter that has risen to the top, add more if necessary, season with salt, pepper, and pounded mace. Put the venison into pots, set them for a few minutes in the oven; withdraw them, wait till they are cold, and then cover their contents with clarified butter.
This is a preserving recipe, not simply a way of cooking venison: the clarified butter cap is there to keep the meat for weeks in a cool larder. That is the part that does not translate to a modern kitchen.
- The butter seal is the problemFat poured over cooked meat in a pot creates an oxygen-free environment at the bottom of the vessel. That is precisely the condition in which Clostridium botulinum spores, which survive ordinary baking temperatures, can germinate and produce toxin. Nothing in this method destroys spores or prevents their growth.
- No preserving measurements at allThe salt is "season with salt", with no weight given and no curing agent; there is no acid, no measured brine, and no processing temperature or time. A potted meat intended for storage needs all of those specified, and this recipe specifies none of them.
- No storage instructionThe recipe ends at "cover their contents with clarified butter" and says nothing about where the pots go or how long they keep. A cold larder was probably taken for granted; a modern reader has no such default, and the omission is not one that can be filled in by guessing.
- The quantities are unusable anywayNo weight of venison is given against a full pound of butter and an unstated amount of red wine. Even setting the preserving question aside, there is no ratio here to scale from.
- "Put a paste over the pan"This is a luting paste of flour and water, rolled out and pressed over the rim to seal the vessel so the meat bakes in its own steam. It was never meant to be eaten, and it is not pastry.
- If you want potted venisonUse a current recipe with stated salt weights, a stated storage temperature and a stated shelf life. Do not adapt this one.
Potting was the standard English answer to a glut of meat before canning: the flesh was baked or stewed until very soft, pounded with butter and spice, pressed into earthenware pots and sealed under a layer of clarified butter, which excluded air and kept the surface from drying. Venison was among the commonest candidates, because a deer arrived all at once and often as a gift from a landed acquaintance rather than as a purchase — potting turned an awkward windfall into something that could be sliced onto bread and, it is often said, kept for some time or even sent through the post. The mace, pepper and red wine here are the conventional seasoning for potted game, warm and slightly resinous rather than sweet. The recipe, compiled in the later nineteenth century, sets down a technique already two hundred years old, and one still in active domestic and commercial use at the time.