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To Pot Beef or Mutton
622. Take two pounds of lean beef, rub it with saltpetre, and let it lie one night; then salt with common salt, and cover it with water four days in a small pan. Dry it with a cloth, and season with black pepper; lay it in as small a pan as will hold it, cover it with coarse paste, and bake it five hours in a very cool oven. Put no liquor in. When cold, pick out the strings and fat; beat the meat very fine, with a quarter of a pound of fine butter, just warm but not oiled, and as much of the gravy as will make it into a paste. Put into very small pots, and cover with melted butter.
Another. Take beef that has been dressed, either boiled or roasted; beat it in a mortar, with some pepper, salt, one blade of mace to each pot, some grated nutmeg, and a little fine butter, just warm. The flavour of this is equal to the above, but the colour is not so fine. It is a good way for using the remains of a large joint. Another. Pound three or four pounds of lean beef, with half an ounce of saltpetre, the same of sugar, and a large handful of common salt, lay it in a pan for two or three days, turning it occasionally. Wash and put it in a jar with half a pound of butter. Cover close and stew in a water bath till quite tender. Take it out of the liquor, and, while hot, add powdered pepper and mace, and as much of the liquor as is required to make it mix, pound very fine and pot it; and when cold cover with clarified butter.
Three related methods for potted beef, all resting on a saltpetre cure and a butter seal. The vocabulary is worth decoding, but the preserving chemistry here is outside what can be recommended today.
- Saltpetre in the first method is unmeasured"Rub it with saltpetre" gives no quantity at all. Potassium nitrate is a regulated curing agent with a narrow safe range, and a rub applied by eye can land anywhere from ineffective to well over it.
- The third method is far out of rangeHalf an ounce of saltpetre to three or four pounds of meat is many times the nitrate level permitted in modern curing practice. Nitrate and nitrite are toxic in quantity, and this is not a borderline case.
- Days of brining at room temperatureThe meat sits covered with water for four days, or in the dry cure for two or three, with no mention of a cool larder temperature. Period kitchens had cold stone rooms in winter; a modern kitchen does not, and the recipe gives no guidance on where or how cold.
- The butter sealClarified butter poured over potted meat excludes air, which is exactly the anaerobic, low-acid condition in which Clostridium botulinum can grow. The method carries no built-in safety margin and none is stated.
- "Stew in a water bath till quite tender"A water bath cannot exceed boiling point, and the endpoint given is texture rather than temperature or time. Nothing in the instruction guarantees the interior of a jarred three-pound piece of beef reaches a safe temperature, and the third version relies on that step alone.
- "Coarse paste"A stiff flour-and-water crust, sometimes called huff paste, used purely as a lid to trap steam and then discarded. It was never meant to be eaten.
- Oven and vessel termsThe book gives no temperatures; a "very cool oven" in this period is generally taken to mean a slack or falling oven, somewhere around 250F. "Butter just warm but not oiled" means softened to a cream but not melted and separated, which would make the paste greasy.
- If you want potted beefUse a current recipe with measured cure, stated temperatures and refrigerated storage. The second variation here, made from the remains of a cooked joint, is the one closest to modern practice, but even that needs a documented method rather than this one.
Potting was the English answer to preserving cooked meat before canning: pound it fine, pack it airtight into small earthenware pots, and seal the surface with clarified butter. The technique runs through English household books from the seventeenth century onward and produced everything from potted beef and tongue to potted shrimps and char. What is telling here is the frank admission in the second method that leftover roast or boiled beef gives a flavour "equal to the above, but the colour is not so fine" -- the saltpetre was working as much on appearance as on keeping, fixing the red colour that plain cooked beef loses. Nineteenth-century cookery writers often treated the ability to convert the remains of a large joint into something that would sit on a breakfast or supper table as a mark of good household management, and potted meats sat squarely in that tradition.