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Potting (Chicken ham or tongue)
the chicken, ham or tongue to a smooth paste, adding a little of the liquor to moisten, season with cayenne, nutmeg and a tablespoonful of melted butter, put it into small jars or pots and press down tightly. Cover the jars the same as for Potted Fish, stand the jars in a baking pan half full of water and bake a half hour, then take out, remove the cloth and paste, press the meat down again and cover with melted butter. Tie with bladder or tissue paper moistened with white of egg and keep in a cool, dry place. This will keep for months.
Fresh beef's tongue, cold roast veal, cold boiled or roast mutton, ham and smoked tongue may all be potted after the same fashion.
MOCK PATE de FOIE GRAS Lard thickly over the top a whole calf's liver, put it in a stewing pan with two green onions chopped fine, two bay leaves, a blade of mace, a half dozen peppercorns, six whole cloves, a saltspoon of salt, a lump of loaf sugar, and one pint of stock, cover the saucepan and cook gently three hours. When done, remove from the saucepan and cut in thin slices; place them on a meat dish and strain over the liquor. Stand aside over night. Then pound the liver to a paste, adding a teaspoonful of salt, a saltspoon of white pepper and a half pound of melted butter. Mix thoroughly and press the whole through a sieve, then pack into small pots, smooth the top, and pour over melted butter. 5 eggs
This is a preserving recipe rather than a supper dish, and the preservation is the part that has not survived scrutiny. The notes below explain the archaic language and then why the method cannot be followed.
- Why it fails: the butter sealMeat paste packed tight and capped with melted butter is an anaerobic, low-acid, moist environment held at ambient temperature — the classic conditions for Clostridium botulinum to produce toxin. The airless seal that the recipe relies on for keeping is precisely what makes it dangerous.
- Why it fails: the bake is not a processHalf an hour in a pan half full of water brings the centre of a packed jar nowhere near the temperature and time needed to destroy botulinum spores. It pasteurises the surface and no more, while sealing in whatever survives.
- Why it fails: "will keep for months"There is no acid, no measured salt, no nitrite quantity and no temperature anywhere in the instructions. A cool dry larder is not refrigeration, and modern potted meats are treated as short-life chilled products, not shelf-stable ones.
- Why it fails: the mock pâté's overnight standThe sliced liver and its stock are left out overnight at room temperature before being pounded. Cooked liver held for hours in the danger zone supports rapid bacterial growth, and the subsequent pounding and potting involve no further cooking at all.
- Bladder and egg-white sealDried animal bladder was a common airtight cover before greaseproof paper and lids; tissue paper painted with egg white shrinks tight as it dries. Neither is sterile, and both were doing a job now done properly only by refrigeration or commercial retorting.
- Archaic measuresA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. Loaf sugar came from a cone of refined sugar chipped with nippers, so a "lump" is roughly a sugar cube. A blade of mace is one piece of the dried outer covering of nutmeg, not a spoonful of ground.
- The stray lineThe '5 eggs' at the end does not belong to the pâté; it appears to be stray matter carried over from neighbouring text on the page.
- If you want potted meatUse a current recipe for a refrigerated potted meat or chicken liver parfait, with a stated fridge life of a few days. Do not adapt the timings above.
Potting was the English larder's answer to a glut of cooked meat: pound it fine, force it through a sieve, pack it airless and cap it with clarified fat, in the same family of techniques as French confit and rillettes. Potted chicken, ham or tongue could be spread on bread without lighting a range, and a cook could clear the remains of a joint before it spoiled. The "mock pâté de foie gras" belongs to the nineteenth-century genre of mock dishes, in which larded calf's liver stood in for the expensive force-fed goose liver of Strasbourg and Périgord; mock turtle, mock duck and mock cream all worked on the same principle of borrowing a luxury's name for a domestic substitute. The confident promise that it "will keep for months" reflects a period before the bacteriology of anaerobic spoilage was understood in the home, when a good butter seal was genuinely believed to be sufficient.