Pot Pourri
Take any kind of fresh meat chopped fine, and put into a stewpan with a little warm water, pepper and salt, and chopped onion. Cook twenty minutes; then put into a baking-dish with an equal quantity of bread crumbs, and pour over a cup of sweet cream. Bake to a light brown.-Mrs. F. D.
A vague, forgiving formula of the kind that fills the contributed pages of Virginia household books: no quantities, no oven setting, no yield. A few decisions have to be made before it works.
- Scale it yourselfThe recipe gives no quantities at all. A workable batch is 1 lb of chopped meat (about 2 cups) to a roughly equal volume of soft bread crumbs and 1 cup of cream, which serves about four; whether the "equal quantity" was meant by volume or by weight the recipe does not say.
- "Fresh meat"In this period the word distinguishes uncured meat from salted, smoked or corned. Beef, veal, lamb or pork all suit; the dish reads as a use for the trimmings left after a roast was cut down.
- Chopped fineNineteenth-century cooks meant hand-chopped on a board or run through a meat grinder. Commercial ground beef or a few pulses in a food processor gives the same texture; avoid grinding it to paste.
- "Sweet cream"Fresh unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour cream and clabber that were routine in a kitchen without refrigeration. Any pouring cream works; heavy cream makes a richer, firmer set.
- The twenty-minute stewBarely covered with warm water, finely chopped meat is cooked through well before twenty minutes; the time seems aimed at reducing the liquid to a scant, concentrated gravy that the crumbs can drink up, so keep it uncovered and stop when the pan is nearly dry.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs torn from a day-old loaf, not the dry sandy kind sold in canisters. Dried crumbs will absorb the cream and go pasty; if that is all you have, use about half the volume.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; the recipe says only "bake to a light brown." A modern moderate oven, around 350F, for 30 to 40 minutes browns the top without curdling the cream; the mixture is already cooked, so you are only setting and colouring it.
- SeasoningPepper, salt and onion are the whole of it. A grating of nutmeg or mace would be entirely at home in this book if the dish tastes flat.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, is a collection of contributions from named and initialled Virginia housewives, which is why so many entries end with a signature like "Mrs. F. D."; measurements are frequently absent, as in much contributed cookbook writing of the period. The title pot pourri is French for "rotten pot," generally understood as a calque of the Spanish olla podrida, the long-simmered mixed stew whose name came to stand for any medley -- of spices, of dried flowers, of music. Here it has been detached from the stewpot altogether and applied to a meat-and-crumb bake, the sort of second-day dish that turned a Sunday roast into Monday supper.