Partridge, Potted
INGREDIENTS. -Partridges; seasoning to taste, of mace, allspice, white pepper and salt; butter, coarse paste.
Pluck and draw the birds, and wipe them inside with a damp cloth. Pound well some mace, allspice, white pepper and salt; mix together, and rub every part of the partridges with this. Pack the birds as close as possible in a baking-pan, with plenty of butter over them, and cover with a coarse flour-and-water crust. Tie a paper over this, and bake for rather more than 1½ hour; let the birds get cold, then cut them into pieces for keeping, pack them closely into a large potting-pot, and cover with clarified butter.
This should be kept in a cool dry place. The butter used for potted things will answer for basting, or for paste for meat pies.
PARTRIDGE, ROAST.
PARTRIDGES, HASHED. cut carrot and turnip in 1 pint of stock; TIME. -1 hour.
SEASONABLE from the 1st of September to when quite tender, put them to the partthe beginning of February.
This is a preserving recipe, not a dinner recipe: the birds are baked under a flour crust, cut up, and sealed under butter for storage at cellar temperature. That storage method is the reason it cannot be followed today.
- Why the butter seal is the problemClarified butter over cold cooked meat creates an airtight, oxygen-free layer, which is precisely the condition Clostridium botulinum needs to germinate and produce toxin. Potted meats and pâtés sealed under fat and held above refrigeration temperature are a documented botulism vehicle, and the toxin gives no smell, taste or visible sign.
- No cure, no measured saltThe seasoning is "to taste" — mace, allspice, pepper and salt rubbed on by hand. There is no weighed salt percentage and no nitrite, so nothing in the recipe controls bacterial growth during weeks of storage. "Rub every part" is not a cure.
- "A cool dry place" is not a temperatureThe instruction assumes a stone larder or cellar, perhaps 45–55F in a British winter. A modern kitchen cupboard sits at 65–75F, well inside the growth range for the organism, and even a genuine cold larder is not a control you can verify.
- "Cut them into pieces for keeping"Jointing the cooked birds, handling the pieces, and packing them into a pot recontaminates the meat after cooking. Nothing afterwards brings it back to a safe temperature — the butter is poured over, not boiled with the meat.
- The crust is not foodThe crust is not the dish -- "coarse paste" here is the flour-and-water crust the recipe specifies, serving as a sealed lid to trap steam and butter. Such crusts were generally discarded rather than served, and the paper tied over it was presumably to stop it scorching.
- Stray lines from neighbouring entriesThe lines after "paste for meat pies" are fragments carried over from the adjoining entries for roast and hashed partridge, including the cut carrot and turnip in a pint of stock. The seasonable dates, 1 September to the beginning of February, are the English partridge season and belong to this entry.
- If you want potted gameUse a current recipe with weighed salt, a stated core temperature and refrigerated or frozen storage with a use-by date. Do not adapt the method above by guesswork.
Potting was the English answer to a glut of game before refrigeration: meat was baked to dryness under a flour lid, pounded or jointed, packed tight and sealed with clarified butter, which excludes air and keeps fat-soluble flavour in. The technique is much older than Mrs Beeton -- seventeenth- and eighteenth-century receipt books include potted venison, char and woodcock, and potted meats were sent long distances as gifts and, later, sold commercially in pots. Two details here mark it as a working household document rather than a modern recipe: the butter is explicitly saved for basting and pie paste afterwards, and the entry closes with a season, September to February, because a partridge could not be bought out of it. The mace-and-allspice seasoning is one of the common potting blends of the period, warm spices being thought to help preservation as well as flavour, and mace still features in the spicing of British potted shrimps.