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salt and pepper; lay them close in a small deep pan, for the smaller the surface and the closer they are packed the less butter will be wanted; cover them with butter, then with very thick paper tied down, and bake them; when cold, put them dry into pots that will hold two or three in each, and pour butter over them, using that which was baked as part. Observe that the butter should be pretty thick it they are to be kept. If pigeons are boned, and then put in an oval form into the pot, they will lie closer, and require less butter. They may be stuffed with a fine forcemeat made with veal and bacon.
Another Way.-Bone and season them with pepper and salt, put them in a pot with as much butter as will cover them; bake till very tender; drain them from the gravy, and wipe them dry with a cloth , season again with salt, pepper, mace and cloves pounded; put them closely into pots, and when cold melt the butter from the gravy, and pour it an inch thick over the meat.
This is a potting recipe: birds baked in butter, packed tight, then sealed under a layer of fat so they can be kept for weeks without cold storage. That last step is the problem, and it is not one that a change of timing or temperature fixes.
- Why the butter seal is the hazardA layer of fat poured an inch thick over cooked meat creates exactly the airless, low-acid, room-temperature environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin. Baking the birds kills vegetative bacteria but not the spores, and the seal then protects them from oxygen rather than from spoilage.
- No cure, no measured saltThere is no nitrite, no weighed salt percentage and no acidification here — nothing that would inhibit spore growth. The salt, mace and cloves are seasoning, not preservation, whatever the original intends them to do.
- Draining, wiping and reseasoningThe second method's instruction to wipe the meat dry and season it again removes surface moisture and gravy, which slows visible spoilage. It does nothing to the spores already in the meat, so the pot can look and smell entirely sound while being unsafe.
- \The recipe's own qualifier — that the butter should be pretty thick if the birds are to be kept — is the point at which it stops being a cooked dish and becomes an unrefrigerated preserve. Use a current, tested recipe if you want potted meat.
- What the method was doingBaking in butter cooks small birds to the point where the flesh leaves the bone easily, and the fat excludes air during the bake as well as after. The original gives no oven temperature or time at all beyond 'bake till very tender', which is normal for the period and another reason not to work from it.
- The forcemeatA veal-and-bacon forcemeat was a common stuffing for boned birds in period cookery, bacon supplying the fat that lean veal lacks. Boning and packing the birds in an oval, as the text notes, does reduce the butter needed — the logic is sound even where the preservation is not.
Potting was an English larder counterpart to the terrine and the confit: meat, game or fish cooked with spice, pressed into a pot and sealed under butter, which set hard and kept air off. Potting recipes appear in printed English cookery from the seventeenth century onward. Pigeons were kept in dovecotes on estates of any size and were cheap and plentiful in season — hence the run of recipes for boning and packing them tight. The economy of the method is visible in the instructions themselves: the smaller the pan and the closer the packing, the less butter is spent.