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To pot leg of beef
Boil a leg of beef till the meat will come off the bone easily; then mix it with a cow heal, previously cut into thin pieces, and season the whole with salt and spice; add a little of the liquor in which the leg of beef was boiled, put it into a cheese-vat or cullender or some other vessel that will let the liquor run off; place a very heavy weight over it, and it will be ready for use in a day or two. It may be kept in souse made of bran boiled in water, with the addition of a little vinegar.
This is a pressed brawn in all but name, and the cooking part of it is sound enough. The problem is the last sentence: the keeping method has no measured salt, no measured acid and no temperature, and it is the whole point of the receipt.
- The storage is the failureA pressed block of gelatinous meat held in a bran-and-vinegar "souse" at room temperature is an unmeasured cure. There is no stated salt concentration and no stated acidity, so nothing here reliably holds the pH below 4.6 or the water activity low enough to stop bacterial growth in a low-oxygen, protein-rich mass. Use a current, tested recipe if you want to make brawn.
- Bran liquor is not a preservativeBran boiled in water is a starchy, nutrient-rich medium. It feeds spoilage organisms rather than suppressing them, and the "little vinegar" is not quantified. In a household without cold storage the practical safeguards would have been a cool larder and eating the thing quickly, but the receipt says nothing about how long it keeps.
- The pressing itselfWeighting the meat while warm sets it in its own gelatine, which is why cow heel is in the receipt at all. That step is technique, not preservation, and it does nothing to make the keeping method safe.
- Cow healCow heel: the foot of the animal, sold split. It is almost pure collagen and was the standard cheap source of setting gelatine in British cookery. Butchers still sell it on request in some places, though it is no longer a supermarket item.
- Cheese-vatA shallow perforated wooden or tin mould used in dairying to drain curd. Here it serves only as a press with drainage; a colander, as the receipt says, does the same job.
- SpiceIn a potted meat of this kind "spice" commonly means mace and black pepper, and sometimes clove or allspice, but the receipt does not say. The proportions are left entirely to the cook.
- SouseThe word covers both the pickling liquor and the pickled meat itself. Souse in this period was usually brine or vinegar; a bran-based version is unusual.
Potted and pressed beef of this kind sits at the humble end of the English larder. A leg of beef is generally reckoned among the shin cuts, one of the toughest and cheapest parts of the animal, and it needs the long boil the receipt calls for before the meat will leave the bone; the cow heel added with it supplies the gelatine that binds the shredded meat into a sliceable block once weighted. The result is essentially brawn, the same principle as a head cheese, and it belongs to a household economy in which a butcher's offcuts were turned into something that could be sliced cold for days of breakfasts and suppers. The instruction to keep it in bran-and-vinegar souse reflects a period before reliable cold storage, when preservation was a matter of judgement and a cool stone larder rather than measurement.