Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Potted Crayfish
Potted Crayfish
Remove all the meat from five or six dozen boiled crayfish, put it into a mortar and pound it well with two ounces of butter and a seasoning of ground mace, pepper and salt. When all these are pounded to a smooth paste stuff it into jars, cover over with warm butter, tie the jars over with bladder to prevent the air from getting into it, and it will then be ready for use.
This is a preserving recipe, not a spread to be eaten the same afternoon, and it is the preserving that fails modern scrutiny. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then the specific hazard.
- Why it cannot be made as writtenCooked shellfish sealed under a layer of butter and tied down with bladder is a low-acid, moist, oxygen-free environment held at room temperature. That is the precise set of conditions in which Clostridium botulinum spores, which survive boiling, germinate and produce toxin. Nothing in the method reaches a temperature or acidity that controls them, and no amount of salt or mace here is sufficient.
- The butter seal is the problem, not the protectionThe warm butter poured over the top was understood as the barrier that kept air out. Keeping air out is exactly what favours the organism of concern, and the toxin cannot be detected by smell or taste. Use a current, tested recipe if you want a potted seafood preparation.
- BladderA cleaned pig or ox bladder, soaked soft and tied wet over the jar mouth so it shrank tight as it dried. It was one of the common covers used before rubber rings and screw lids, and bladders were still obtainable for the purpose into the early twentieth century.
- Crayfish quantityFive or six dozen whole boiled crayfish yield a modest quantity of picked tail and claw meat, varying widely with size. Oscar gives no weight; the crayfish are counted rather than weighed.
- Ground maceThe lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself. It was the default spice for potted fish and shellfish in Anglo-American cookery, and it is still sold ground, though it fades quickly on the shelf.
- The mortarPounding meat to a paste with butter in a mortar does much the same job as a food processor, though the pounded texture is generally coarser.
Potting is the English preservation method that ran alongside salting and smoking: cooked flesh pounded with butter and spice, packed tight, and sealed under more butter to exclude air. Shrimps, lampreys, char and beef were all potted this way from the seventeenth century onward, and potted crayfish belonged to the same family. Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book of 1896 gathered a great deal of this inherited English material into a book otherwise concerned with the Waldorf's French-influenced service, which is why a seventeenth-century larder technique, bladder covers and all, sits in a volume from the age of the commercial ice plant. By the time it was printed the method was already a survival rather than a necessity; refrigeration was reaching city kitchens, and potted preparations were becoming what they are now, a spread eaten fresh rather than a store laid down.