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To Pot Partridge
630. Clean them nicely, and season with mace, allspice, white pepper, and salt, in fine powder; rub every part well, then lay the breasts downwards in a pan, and pack the birds as close as you possibly can; put a good deal of butter on them, then cover the pan with a coarse flour paste, and a paper over, tie it close, and bake. When cold, put the birds into pots, and cover them with butter. Another (a very cheap way of potting birds). - Prepare them as directed in the last receipt; and when baked and grown cold , cut them into proper pieces for helping, pack them close in a large pottingpot, and, if possible, leave no spaces to receive the butter. Cover them with butter, and one-third part less will be wanted than when the birds are done whole.
To POT WOODCOCKS. 631. The same as the pigeons, excepting that the trail must be left in. TO POT Ox CHEEK. 632. When you stew an ox cheek take some of the fleshy part, season well with pepper and salt, and beat it in a mortar, with a little clear fat skimmed off the gravy. Put it close into pots and cover with clarified butter; or, cut it in slices and lay them into an earthenware mould with come of the gravy; when cold, turn it out as a breakfast or supper dish. Calf's head stewed may be treated as above. olo
These are potting receipts: game baked under butter, then sealed in pots with more butter and kept as a larder standby. The technique is the problem, and it is not one that can be adjusted around.
- The butter seal is the hazardA layer of butter over cooked meat creates exactly the oxygen-free, low-acid, moist environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin. Spores survive baking; the seal then protects them. Potted meats of this kind are a recognised cause of botulism, and the toxin gives no warning by smell, taste or appearance.
- No measured cureThe seasoning here is mace, allspice, white pepper and salt "in fine powder", rubbed on by eye. There is no weighed salt percentage and no curing salt, so nothing in the recipe controls bacterial growth during storage.
- No temperature, no timeThe instruction is simply "bake", with the pan luted under flour paste and paper. Nothing in the receipt establishes that the interior of a tightly packed pan of birds ever reaches a safe temperature, and nothing establishes how long the pots are meant to keep.
- The second method is worseCutting the cold cooked birds into pieces and packing them into a large pot introduces handling contamination after cooking, into a container that will then be sealed. The 'one-third part less' butter follows from packing the pieces to leave no spaces rather than from any change to the seal itself.
- Woodcock and the trailReceipt 631 keeps the trail (the intestines) in, which was standard practice for woodcock and snipe. Cooked and eaten hot the same day this is a matter of taste; sealed under butter for storage it adds gut flora to the pot.
- Ox cheek and calf's headReceipt 632 applies the same treatment to pounded stewed beef cheek and to sliced meat set in gravy. Both are low-acid, both are stored sealed, and both carry the same risk as the birds.
- If you want potted gameUse a current recipe that treats potted meat as a fresh refrigerated preparation with a short stated shelf life, rather than a preserve.
Potting was the English answer to confit: meat cooked slowly with plenty of butter, packed into glazed earthenware pots and sealed with a clarified butter cap, kept in a cool larder and cut into for breakfast, supper or the traveller's basket. The coarse flour paste stretched over the pan in receipt 630 is of the kind sometimes called a huff paste ot something to eer to eat, its job to trap steam and butter around tightly packed birds; the book itself gives it no name and states no oven heat. Potted game was a country-house economy as much as a delicacy, a way of using up the bag when more birds came in than could be roasted, which is why the compiler notes the second method as 'a very cheap way of potting birds', jointing them so less butter would be needed. Woodcock keeping its trail reflects the long-held English view that the bird's innards were the best part of it; the explanation usually offered ccleanly rather than documented.