Potted Ham
Mince some cold cooked ham, mixing lean and fat together; pound in a mortar, seasoning at the same time with a little cayenne pepper, pounded mace and mustard. Put into a dish, and place in the oven for one-half an hour; afterward pack it into pots or little stone jars, covering with paraffine and paper. This is convenient for sandwiches.
This is a preserving recipe dressed up as a sandwich filling, and the preserving half of it is where it fails. The seasoning and the pounding are unremarkable; the paraffin seal and the implied shelf storage are not.
- The paraffin seal is the problemWax over cooked meat creates an oxygen-free layer above a moist, low-acid, low-salt food held at room temperature. That is the exact set of conditions in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate, and the toxin they produce is neither visible nor detectable by smell. Traditional potting relied on clarified butter, a cool larder and quick consumption, none of which the recipe specifies.
- No measured cure, no measured heatThere is no salt weight, no nitrite, no processing temperature and no holding time — nothing that would make the ham safe for storage rather than merely warm. Half an hour in an unspecified oven is a flavour step, not a kill step, and a preserving method with no numbers in it cannot be evaluated at all.
- Handling before packingCold cooked ham is minced, pounded, dished, baked, then repacked into jars — several rounds of contact with hands, mortar and pestle, and open air, with nothing between the oven and the seal. Any recontamination after the oven is sealed in with the wax.
- If you want potted hamUse a current tested recipe that treats it as a refrigerated spread with a stated shelf life, not a shelf-stable preserve.
- "Paraffine"Not the fuel oil. In American usage of this period it means solid paraffin wax, sold in blocks for sealing jams and jellies. Even for high-acid preserves the practice has been abandoned, because the seal is unreliable and shrinks away from the glass as it cools.
- "Pounded mace"Ground mace — the lacy aril that surrounds the nutmeg seed, warmer and lighter than nutmeg itself. It was a standard potting spice alongside cayenne, and is still sold ground, though it loses its perfume quickly on the shelf.
- "Mustard"In an American kitchen of this period this almost certainly means dry mustard powder rather than a prepared condiment. Reading it as jarred mustard would throw both the moisture and the acidity of the mixture off.
Potting is the older English answer to the question of what to do with cooked meat before refrigeration: pound it fine with spices, press it into a pot to exclude air, and seal the top with a layer of fat, usually clarified butter. The technique runs through English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward and covers everything from beef and tongue to shrimps and char. What marks this version as late and American is the paraffin — a cheap industrial wax that had come into household use for sealing jelly glasses by the end of the nineteenth century, and which is here extended to a savoury good it was never suited to. The Butterick Publishing Company sold this book alongside its dress patterns to the same middle-class readership, and the closing line gives away the intended use: not a larder store for the winter, but something to keep in the pantry for sandwiches.