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Potted Chicken
Take cold roast chicken, rejecting the sinews and skin, chop fine and to every pint allow a half cup of chopped tongue or ham. Put the bones left from the chicken into a saucepan, add one pint of cold water and boil down to less than a half pint. Strain, and remove the fat. Pound (72)
The text breaks off mid-instruction at the printed page turn, so what survives is the preparation rather than the finish: chopped cold chicken, a little cured meat, and a strong reduction of the bones to bind it. The rest of the method, in every version of this dish, is pounding the meat smooth with the jelly and some butter, packing it tight into small pots, and sealing the surface.
- The hinge is the reductionA pint of water boiled down to under half a pint over chicken bones is what sets the pot; it is a concentrated gelatin stock, not a broth. Chill a spoonful on a saucer before you stop reducing — it should be firmly tacky, close to jelly, or the potted meat will crumble when cut.
- MeasuresA pint here is 2 cups, and "every pint" of chopped chicken is by volume, not weight — figure roughly 8 to 12 oz of picked meat per pint, a good part of one roast bird. The half cup of tongue or ham reads as a seasoning rather than a filler.
- Tongue or hamBoth are supplying salt and cure flavour. Any firm cooked ham works; salt beef tongue is a specialty-butcher item now. Because the cured meat is already salty, season the mixture at the end rather than at the start.
- Pounding"Pound" means mortar and pestle, worked until the fibres break down into a paste. A food processor does it in under a minute, but pulse rather than run it — over-processed chicken turns gluey and pasty.
- ButterThe recipe breaks off before the finish, but potted meats of this kind are generally completed with softened butter worked into the paste and clarified butter poured over the top. Use clarified butter for the seal, not whole butter: the milk solids in whole butter spoil first and break the seal.
- StorageA butter seal was a larder technology. Treat the finished pots as you would any cooked chicken salad — refrigerated, covered, eaten within three or four days. Do not keep them at room temperature on the strength of the butter.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; one bird's worth of meat will make a couple of cups of paste, enough for a first course or sandwich filling for a small party. Bring it to cool room temperature before serving or the butter reads as waxy.
Potting was the English answer to a cooked joint that would not survive the week: the meat was pounded fine, bound with its own jelly and butter, pressed into a crock and sealed under a lid of clarified fat that kept air off the surface. The technique long predates canning and shades into the French terrine and rillette tradition, and by the late nineteenth century it was often less a preservation method than a way of turning the remains of a roast into something presentable. The dish is served cold, needs no fire at table, and uses up the Sunday chicken. The bone reduction called for here is the same instinct that produces aspic — cooks understood that the gelatin in joints and carcasses would set a dish firm.