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Potted Rabbit
Potted meats will keep for months if required, and can be drawn upon as the occasion requires. 2 small rabbits or 1 large one. 1 pound of fat bacon. 1 pound of veal. The liver of the rabbits. Salt, pepper and spices. Cut the rabbit in pieces and put it in a stone jar; cut the veal and bacon in large dice, mix them and add a teaspoonful of mixed mace, cloves and black pepper, and a teaspoonful of salt, and fill the spaces between the pieces of rabbit. Lay a thin slice or two of bacon on top and 1 bay leaf, then cover with a lid of p'ain paste made of flour and water only, set the jar in a pan or pot containing water and bake in a slow oven 3 or 4 hours. There is no water needed in the meat. A greased paper on top will keep the paste from burning.
When done, set the jar away to become cold, pick the meat from the pieces of rabbit and pound them to a paste along with the veal, and bacon and fat, and if any gravy at the bottom boil down almost dry and mix it in. Taste for seasoning. Press solid into small jars or cups, and cover the top with the clear part of melted butter. Keep tightly covered in a cool place.
This is a preserving recipe, not simply a cooked dish, and the preserving method is the problem. The cooking itself is unremarkable; the instruction to keep the sealed pots for months in a cool place is what puts it out of reach.
- Why the storage failsPotted meat sealed under butter is a low-acid, low-salt, oxygen-free food held at cellar temperature. Those are precisely the conditions in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin, and the toxin gives no smell, taste or visible sign.
- The oven never gets hot enoughA jar of meat standing in a water bath cannot exceed about 212F however long it bakes. That kills bacteria but not botulinum spores, which need retort temperatures well above boiling. Three or four hours in a slow oven leaves the spores intact.
- Handling after cookingThe meat is picked from the bones and pounded to a paste by hand after baking, then pressed cold into fresh pots. Every step after the oven reintroduces organisms into a product that will then be sealed away from air for weeks.
- No cure, no acid, no measured saltA teaspoonful of salt to four pounds or more of meat is a seasoning, not a preservative. The bacon brings a little cure with it, but there is no added nitrite, no vinegar and no sugar cure here, and nothing in the formula that would lower water activity or pH enough to matter.
- The butter seal is the hazard, not the safeguardClarified butter poured over the top excludes air, which is why Victorian cooks trusted it. Excluding air is exactly what favours the anaerobe of concern; the seal that keeps the surface from spoiling visibly also removes the warning signs.
- If you want potted rabbitUse a current recipe with tested refrigeration and freezing times, and treat the result as a fresh pate rather than a store-cupboard item. Do not scale the keeping instructions here down to something that feels shorter and safer.
Potting is one of the oldest English methods of keeping cooked meat: the flesh is baked slowly with fat, pounded smooth, packed hard into a jar and sealed under clarified butter, a technique in print in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward and still routine in Victorian and Edwardian households. The flour-and-water lid here "plain paste made of flour and water only" is made without fat and never intended to be eaten; it is a disposable lid that seals the jar and holds the steam in, a survival from the days when pastry served as cooking vessel rather than dish. Rabbit was the natural candidate, being cheap, abundant and lean enough to need the pound of bacon and pound of veal that carry the fat and the body. The confident opening line about keeping for months is a fair record of what cooks then believed, and a reminder of what a larder shelf, a tight lid and a layer of butter were expected to do before mechanical refrigeration and before botulism was widely understood.