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Potted Meat and Fish for Sandwiches
INGREDIENTS.
1 pound of tender cooked meat or fish (2 cups). 2 ounces of fat cooked meat (¼ a cup). 2 ounces of butter (¼ a cup).
Mace and anchovy essence, if desired.
Pepper and salt.
Method. -Chop the meat or fish very fine, then pass through a purée sieve; cream the butter and with a wooden spoon work it into the meat or fish; add seasonings to taste, press the mixture solidly into small jars or cups, and pour melted butter to the depth of one-fourth an inch over the top of the meat. Set aside in a cool place.
The paste itself is nothing more than cooked meat, fat and butter worked smooth, but the recipe's whole point is the sealed jar set aside in a cool place, and that is a preserving method modern food safety does not accept. The notes below explain the failure and decode the archaic terms.
- Why the butter seal failsA quarter-inch of clarified butter poured over pounded meat excludes air, which is exactly the anaerobic, low-acid, low-salt condition in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin. The meat is cooked, but cooking does not destroy those spores, and a "cool place" in 1900 meant a larder at cellar temperature, not 40F.
- No measured cureThere is no weighed salt, no nitrite, no water-activity control and no processing time or temperature anywhere in the recipe. Seasoning "to taste" cannot be relied on to inhibit anything. If you want a potted meat that keeps, use a current tested recipe with specified quantities.
- Handling multiplies the riskThe meat is chopped, forced through a sieve and worked by hand with a spoon after it has been cooked, then packed solid. Every one of those steps reintroduces surface bacteria into the interior of a dense mass that will never be reheated before eating.
- Anchovy essenceA thin, strongly salted anchovy extract sold by the bottle in British and American groceries of the period, closer to a liquid than to modern anchovy paste. It was used as a savoury seasoning long before the word umami reached English.
- MaceThe dried outer covering of the nutmeg, sold in blades or ground. It is milder and less resinous than nutmeg and was the standard warm spice for potted meats and fish.
- The 2 ounces of "fat cooked meat"Most likely a binder rather than a garnish: a fatty piece of the cooked meat, such as fat bacon or pork, worked in so the paste stays smooth instead of dry and crumbly. The recipe does not specify which cut is meant.
- Purée sievePurée sieve -- A tinned wire or horsehair sieve through which the chopped meat was pushed with a wooden spoon or mushroom-shaped pestle. Sieving, along with pounding in a mortar, was how a smooth paste was obtained before mechanical grinders and processors were common.
- QuantitiesThe fractions are garbled in the original printing: one pound of meat is given as 2 cups, and both the 2-ounce quantities of fat meat and butter are a quarter cup each.
Potting is one of the oldest English methods of keeping cooked flesh, documented in household books from the seventeenth century onward: meat or fish was pounded to a paste with butter and spice, packed into an earthenware pot and sealed under a layer of clarified butter. Potted beef, potted ham, potted shrimps and potted salmon were all standard, and the technique survived into the twentieth century partly as a way of using up the remains of a joint and partly because it produced something spreadable. The recipe is a good illustration of how a preserving method can outlive its own logic: refrigeration was spreading in middle-class kitchens by the turn of the century, but the instruction to seal with butter and set the jars in a cool place was carried forward from an era when that seal was the main protection a household had.