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Potted Tongue or Ham
Remove all skin, gristle, and outside parts from one pound of the lean of cold boiled tongue or ham.
Pound it in a mortar to a smooth paste with either one quarter pound of the fat, or with two ounces fresh butter, Season with cayenne, pounded mace and allspice.
Press it well into pots and cover with clarified butter or fat.
A potted meat in the English manner: cooked tongue or ham pounded with fat, seasoned hot, and sealed under a butter cap. It comes together in ten minutes in a food processor, but the storage assumptions behind it no longer hold.
- The butter seal is not a preservativeClarified butter over potted meat was a larder technique from an age without refrigeration, and it excludes air rather than sterilising anything. Keep the pots in the refrigerator and eat within three or four days; a sealed, low-acid, oxygen-poor meat paste left at room temperature is exactly the conditions botulism favours.
- Mortar or processorA food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar does in fifteen minutes, but pulse rather than run it — you want a dense paste, not an emulsion. If the meat is dry, a spoonful of the cooking liquor or a little cream loosens it without thinning the texture.
- ProportionsOne pound of lean to four ounces of fat, or to two ounces of butter, gives roughly 20 percent and 10 percent fat respectively. The butter version is lighter and firmer when cold; the ham-fat version tastes more strongly of the meat and spreads better straight from the refrigerator.
- Pounded maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg and is a characteristic flavour of English potted meats. Ground mace from a jar works; if you only have nutmeg, use about two-thirds as much, though the result is sweeter and less resinous. Start with a quarter teaspoon of mace per pound and a pinch each of allspice and cayenne, then taste — cold pastes read blander than warm ones, so season a little past what seems right.
- SaltThe recipe adds none, on the assumption the tongue or ham was brined. Modern deli ham and cooked tongue vary widely; taste before potting and add salt only if the paste falls flat.
- Clarifying the butterMelt butter gently, skim the foam, and pour off the clear fat leaving the milky solids behind. Those milk solids are what spoil first, which is why the recipe specifies clarified. Pour it on when the potted meat is thoroughly cold so it sets as a clean layer rather than sinking in.
- TongueCold boiled tongue here would be a whole tongue (usually beef) simmered until tender, then peeled while warm — the skin will not come off cold. A pound of trimmed lean is something between a third and a half of a large tongue.
- YieldAbout a pound and a quarter of paste with the quarter pound of fat, a little less with the two ounces of butter, which fills roughly two half-pint ramekins and serves eight to ten as a spread on toast or thin brown bread.
Potting was the English answer to the problem of the leftover joint: pound cooked meat with fat, spice it heavily, press out the air and cap it with butter, and the result was said to keep for some time in a cool larder and to travel well besides. The technique reaches Virginia kitchens through the English cookbook tradition, and Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of such thrift. Tongue and ham were obvious candidates because both were cured and boiled whole, produced far more meat than one meal required, and were already salty enough to pot well. The heavy hand with mace, allspice and cayenne is characteristic of the older potted meats, where the spices did seasoning and masking work; by the twentieth century the same idea had been industrialised into tinned potted meat products, and the domestic version largely disappeared.