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WOODCOCK, POTTED (another way) (Rub the woodcocks very well)
Rub the woodcocks very well with seasoning, then surround each with a coating of butter, and next with a buttered paper, over which put a paste of flour and water. Lay them upon tins, and bake them. Do not take off the crust and paper till the woodcocks are cold. Put one in each pot, and cover it with clarified butter. The woodcocks must not be drawn.
This is a preserving recipe rather than a supper dish: the birds are baked inside a flour-and-water huff paste, then sealed under butter to keep for weeks in a cool larder. Both the method and the bird itself put it out of reach of a modern kitchen.
- Why the cautionPotting seals cooked meat in an oxygen-free environment under fat and holds it for long periods without refrigeration. That is precisely the condition in which Clostridium botulinum spores, which survive baking, can germinate and produce toxin. The recipe gives no salt concentration, no core temperature and no storage limit, so there is nothing to work from.
- The undrawn bird"The woodcocks must not be drawn" means the intestines stay in, as was traditional with woodcock and snipe. Cooked and eaten at once that is a matter of taste; sealed under butter and kept for weeks, gut contents in the pot are a further contamination route with no control on it.
- Legal status of the birdIn the United States the American woodcock is a migratory game bird protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act; it may be taken only in season by licensed hunters and never bought or sold. In Britain the Eurasian woodcock is a licensed quarry species, though it may lawfully be sold dead during the permitted season and does reach game dealers then.
- The huff pasteThe flour-and-water crust is not eaten. It is a sacrificial casing that seals in steam and stops the buttered paper scorching, the same principle as salt-crust baking. The instruction to leave crust and paper on until the birds are cold is about keeping them moist and sealed as they cool, not about flavour.
- Clarified butter as a sealClarified butter has the milk solids and most of the water removed, so it sets to an airtight cap that will not go rancid or mould as quickly as whole butter. It was the standard closure for potted meats and fish throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It excludes air; it does nothing to prevent anaerobic spoilage.
- If you want potted gameUse a current, tested recipe with specified salt levels, cooking temperatures and refrigerated storage times, and treat the result as a short-life fridge item rather than a larder preserve.
Potting is often compared to the French terrine: meat or fish cooked hard, packed into small earthenware or china pots, and sealed under a disc of clarified butter so it could travel and keep. Woodcock and snipe were the aristocrats of the potted-game shelf, and the instruction not to draw them reflects an old sporting conviction that the bird's trail is the best part of it, traditionally spread on toast set beneath the roasting bird to catch the drippings. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in late-Victorian London, sits at the end of that tradition: shooting estates still sent game to town in quantity, larders were cool rooms rather than cold ones, and a sealed pot was one of the few ways a household could hold cooked meat for more than a day or two. Domestic refrigeration and food-safety science between them narrowed the practice, though potted shrimps and potted meats have persisted, and still do, as short-keeping items.