Lobster, Potted
INGREDIENTS. - 2 lobsters; seasoning to taste of nutmeg, pounded mace, white pepper and salt; lb. of butter, 3 or 4 bay-leaves. AVERAGE COST, 4s.
Take out the meat carefully from the shell, but do not cut it up. Put some butter at the bottom of a aish, lay in the leaves and seasoning between. Cover with lobster as evenly as possible, with the baybutter and bake for hour in a gentle oven. When done, drain the whole on a sieve and lay the pieces in potting-jars, with the seasoning about them. When cold, pour over it clarified butter; and, if very highly seasoned, it will keep some time.
TIME. hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Note.-Potted lobster may be used cold, or as a fricassee; with cream sauce.
Lobster (à la Mode Française).
This is a Victorian preserve as much as a dish: cooked shellfish sealed under a layer of fat and kept, unrefrigerated, for weeks. That storage method is the problem, and it cannot be recommended.
- Why the butter seal is the hazardClarified butter poured over cooked lobster creates a sealed, oxygen-free, low-acid, high-moisture environment held at room temperature. Those are precisely the conditions in which Clostridium botulinum spores, which survive gentle oven cooking, can germinate and produce toxin. The toxin is odourless and tasteless, and the food gives no sign of spoilage.
- Seasoning is not a preservativeThe recipe's own hedge - "if very highly seasoned, it will keep some time" - reflects a genuine Victorian belief that mace, nutmeg and pepper preserved potted goods. They do not. Only salt at measured curing concentrations, acidity, refrigeration or retort processing controls the organisms involved, and none of those is specified here.
- Shellfish specificallyLobster meat is near-neutral in pH and rich in free amino acids, which makes it among the poorer candidates for ambient storage. Whatever the recipe's claim that it 'will keep some time', that is not a keeping method that can be relied on.
- Quantity of butter unclearThe butter is given only as a fraction of a pound with the fraction missing, so the ratio of fat to meat cannot be reconstructed from the text as it stands.
- Oven and timing unclearBoth the baking time and the closing TIME entry have lost their fractions, and "a gentle oven" in this period means a low, slow oven rather than any stated figure. There is no reliable process time to work from.
- If you want the flavourPotted shellfish made to a current recipe, chilled throughout and eaten within a few days, is an entirely ordinary thing to make. Use one of those rather than adapting this.
- The note at the end"Potted lobster may be used cold, or as a fricassee; with cream sauce" -- indicates the potted meat was intended to be eaten cold or reheated into a sauce.
Potting - cooking a meat or fish, packing it tight in a jar and sealing it under clarified butter - was one of the standard English preservation techniques from the seventeenth century onward, alongside salting, smoking and pickling. It travelled well: potted lobster, shrimp, char and beef were sent as gifts and sold by fishmongers in the coastal towns, and Morecambe Bay potted shrimps remain the best-known survivor. Cold larders, small batches and quick eating were probably as important to the method's success as the preserving butter itself, though this is inference rather than documented fact; the confident Victorian claim that heavy spicing extended keeping was traditional rather than tested. The "average cost, 4s." is a reminder that lobster in Mrs Beeton's day was a substantial expense for a middle-class kitchen, which is exactly why nothing of the animal was wasted.