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Potted Chicken
Take a fowl, pluck and draw, skin, chop, and put it into a stockpot with one quart of water and a ham bone, and stew gently for six hours. Take it out, cut off all the meat, chop it fine or pass it through a mincing machine, and pound in a mortar, adding a little of the liquor to moisten. Pack it tightly in small pots or jars, cover with clarified butter, and place one side until wanted.
This is a potted meat — a shelf preserve, not a dish to serve from the pot the same day. The preservation method is what puts it out of reach.
- The butter seal is the problemClarified butter poured over pounded cooked meat creates an oxygen-free layer over a moist, low-acid, low-salt food. That is the exact condition in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin, and the spores survive the six-hour stewing that kills everything else. Nothing in the recipe — no measured salt, no acid, no processing temperature — prevents it.
- "Place one side until wanted"The instruction presupposes conditions it never states: no storage temperature and no keeping time are given, so there is no way to make it as written correspond to anything defensible now. Potted meats and pâtés today are governed by measured salt or nitrite levels, controlled pH, and refrigeration, none of which appear here.
- Handling after cookingThe meat is chopped, machine-minced, and pounded in a mortar after it comes out of the pot, then packed into jars. Every one of those steps reintroduces bacteria to a food that will then be sealed away from air. If you want potted chicken or a chicken rillette, use a current recipe with specified salt and refrigerated storage.
- Terms, for reading the pageA "fowl" is an older laying hen, tough and gelatinous, sold now only as a stewing hen or soup chicken — the six hours reflects that bird, not a modern broiler. "Draw" means remove the innards. "Pass through a mincing machine" is the hand-cranked meat grinder; "pound in a mortar" is what a food processor replaced.
- A quart of water is not a mistakeOne quart to a whole fowl with a ham bone looks scant because the result is a concentrated, gelatin-heavy liquor for moistening the paste, not a broth. The ham bone supplies salt and cured flavour, and it is the only source of salt anywhere in the recipe — nowhere near enough to preserve anything.
Potting was the English answer to the problem of keeping cooked meat before refrigeration: pound it to a paste, press out the air, and cap it with fat so nothing can reach it. Potted beef, tongue, shrimp and game filled the shelves of Victorian larders and the pages of nineteenth-century household books, and the technique was a convenient way of turning a tough old boiling fowl — the bird past laying, too sinewy to roast — into something spreadable. Potted meats faded from home cooking as mechanical refrigeration and commercial canning made them unnecessary; the French rillette is a related idea, the meat cooked and mixed with its fat rather than merely capped with it.