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Potted Ham
626. Slice some cold ham and mince it small, fat and lean together. Then pound it in a mortar, seasoning with cayenne, and powdered mace and nutmeg. Fill with it a large deep pan, and set it in the oven for half an hour; afterwards pack it hard in a stone jar, and fill up with lard. If sufficiently seasoned it will keep well in the winter, and is convenient for travelling.
This is a nineteenth-century keeping recipe rather than a dish for immediate eating, and the keeping method is the problem. The instructions below explain the terms and then why the preserve itself is unsound.
- Why it fails: an unrefrigerated sealed meatHam is packed hard into a jar and sealed under lard, which creates a low-oxygen environment held at room temperature for weeks or months. That is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum to grow and produce toxin, and neither the mild oven step nor the fat cap does anything to prevent it. Botulinum toxin is odourless and gives no warning in taste or appearance.
- Why it fails: no measured cure, no measured heatThe recipe gives no weight of meat, no salt or nitrite figure, no oven temperature and no target internal temperature. Modern potted-meat and preserving practice depends on all four being specified and checked; "half an hour" in an unnamed oven is not a process. If you want potted ham, use a current tested recipe with stated quantities and refrigerated storage.
- "Winter" was the whole safeguard"Winter" was probably part of the safeguard — The author's confidence likely rested on a cold larder in an unheated house, and on hams that were as a rule more heavily salt-cured than modern ones, though the recipe itself says nothing about either. Neither condition holds in a centrally heated kitchen with a mildly cured supermarket ham.
- Mace and nutmegMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and lighter than the nut itself. Nutmeg was bought whole and grated as needed; mace came as dried blades and was pounded to powder, as here. Ground spices lose aroma comparatively quickly.
- Pounding in a mortarThe mortar work is what turns minced ham into a spreadable paste, emulsifying the fat with the lean. A food processor does the same job, which is why potted meats survive as a technique even though this particular storage method does not.
- A stone jarA stoneware or glazed earthenware crock, into which the meat could be pressed down level and covered evenly with fat. It was valued for keeping the contents cool and dark, not for any sealing property of its own.
Potting was the English answer to preserving cooked meat before canning and refrigeration: pound it fine, drive off some moisture with heat, press out the air and cap it with clarified fat or lard. Potted ham, beef, tongue, shrimps and lampreys all appear in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century household books, and the pots travelled well, which is exactly the virtue this entry claims at the end. The reference to travelling is worth noticing: rail journeys and sea voyages of the period offered little reliable food, and a pot of seasoned meat was one of the provisions recommended for the road. The spicing here — cayenne, mace, nutmeg — is a conventional potting mixture of the period, and heavy seasoning was widely believed, not entirely without reason, to help a preserve keep.