Home › Meat Substitutes › Potted Meat
Potted Meat
Salt and pepper Dried herbs Melted suet Chop the meat very fine; pound it in a mortar, adding gradually the butter and seasoning to taste. Pack into small jars; cover with melted suet and keep in a cool place.
This is a preserving recipe disguised as a spread, and the preserving method is the problem. The notes below explain what the text assumes, what it omits, and why the result is not safe by current standards.
- The sealed-fat method is the hazardA layer of melted suet over packed meat creates an oxygen-free environment at the bottom of the jar. Held above refrigeration temperature, that is precisely the condition in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin, which is odourless, tasteless and not destroyed by the gentle warming a potted meat would ever receive. Commercially potted meats are retorted under pressure; a domestic larder cannot reproduce that.
- "A cool place" is not a temperatureIn a period kitchen this meant a stone-floored pantry or cellar, which in warm weather could sit well above refrigeration temperature. Nothing in that range is cold enough to make an anaerobic low-acid meat pack shelf-stable, and the recipe gives no time limit for keeping it.
- No cure, no measured saltPotting recipes meant to keep any length of time generally used a heavier hand with salt, and sometimes saltpetre, in weighed amounts. Here salt is "to taste" only, which is a seasoning quantity, not a preserving one. There is no measured inhibitor of any kind in the jar.
- No cooking step is statedThe text begins with chopping and pounding and never says the meat has been cooked. Traditional potting used the remains of a roast or a long-braised piece; a modern reader following the words literally would be pounding raw meat into a sealed jar.
- The ingredient list is incompleteThis is a loose-leaf page, and the printed list gives only salt, pepper, dried herbs and melted suet, while the method calls for meat and butter with no quantities for either. Even setting safety aside, the recipe cannot be followed as printed.
- Suet, for referenceSuet is the hard fat from around the kidneys of beef or mutton, rendered to a clear liquid and setting firm at room temperature, which is what makes it usable as a seal.
- If you want potted meatUse a current recipe that treats it as a refrigerated spread with a stated shelf life of a few days, rather than a preserve.
Potting is the English counterpart to French rillettes and confit: cooked meat pounded to a paste with butter and spice, packed tight to exclude air, and capped with fat. It was a standard use for the far side of a joint of beef, a ham end, or game past its best, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century household books are full of it, along with potted shrimps, potted cheese and potted salmon. The loose-leaf format of Mrs. Fryer's book, with pages meant to be pulled out and slotted into a binder, may also be why the ingredient column here is thin -- the method carries information the list omits.