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Potted Meat
One pound beef, let simmer for four or five hours, with just enough water to cover. When cold, run through meat chopper and season. Add 1/2 tsp. nutmeg, salt and pepper to taste. Mix to a paste with the liquor the meat has been boiled in; press firmly together, and set in oven with one large tbsp. butter on top. When butter is melted, mix well again, then press once more. Serve cold. Delicious for sandwiches.
— Mrs. Albert R. Tattersall
A one-pound potted beef of the plain English type: long simmer, grind, bind with its own broth, enrich with butter. The hinge is the broth — it carries all the salt and gelatin, so reduce it and add it a spoonful at a time.
- Choose a gelatinous cutShin, chuck or shoulder gives the collagen that sets the paste when cold. Lean round simmered five hours will grind to sawdust and no amount of liquor will save it.
- "Simmer" means barely tremblingHold the water at 180-190F, not a boil. Four to five hours at a true boil will shred the meat and cloud the broth; the same time at a bare simmer leaves it sliceable and the liquor clear enough to gel.
- Reduce the liquor before using itOne pound of beef barely covered will yield only a small quantity of broth, and how much depends on the pot and the rate of evaporation. Boiling it down before mixing it in gives a firmer, better-flavoured paste rather than a wet one. Note that no salt goes into the cooking water here; the seasoning is done at the mixing stage.
- Meat chopperA hand-cranked grinder with the fine plate. A food processor works, pulsed in short bursts; run continuously it makes a gummy purée rather than the slightly fibrous texture potted meat should have.
- Nutmeg is the period signatureHalf a teaspoon to a pound is assertive by current taste but correct for this style of potting. Grate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg that has sat in a tin contributes mostly dust.
- The oven stepNo temperature is given because none is needed. A low oven for a few minutes is all that is wanted, just long enough to melt the butter through the top. It is not baking, only warming so the fat can be worked in evenly.
- Press firmly, and press againPack into a small ramekin or terrine and compress hard with the back of a spoon between each stage. Air pockets are what make potted meat crumble when you spread it.
- Yield and keepingAbout a cup and a half, enough for six to eight sandwiches. The butter here is mixed in rather than poured over as a sealing layer, so this is not a preserve: refrigerate and eat within three days.
Potting was the English larder's answer to a surplus of cooked meat long before canning existed — the meat was pounded to a paste, packed into a pot, and sealed under a lid of clarified butter that kept air off it in a cool cellar. In this recipe the mortar and pestle have given way to the meat chopper, and the butter has migrated from a protective seal to simply an enrichment stirred through the paste. The attribution to a contributor by her husband's full name — Mrs. Albert R. Tattersall — is the standard form in fundraising cookbooks of the era, where the recipe and the social credit for it went together.