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Potted Fish
Take some cold cooked fish, remove the skin and bones and chop it fine; peel some freshly-boiled shrimps, chop and mix them with the fish. Put all into a mortar and pound until smooth. Work in with the paste an equal quantity of fresh butter and season to taste with grated nutmeg, mace, salt and a small quantity of cayenne. Pass the mixture through a fine hair-sieve, pack it into small moulds, leave about a quarter of an inch at the top of each, and fill up with clarified butter. Keep the moulds in a cool larder. Turn the fish out of the moulds on a dish with a folded napkin, garnish with parsley, and serve.
This is a potted-fish paste sealed under butter and held at larder temperature — a keeping method, not a same-day spread, and that is where it fails. The notes below explain the terms and the hazard rather than adapting the method.
- The butter seal is the problemA layer of clarified butter poured over cooked fish excludes air, and a cool larder would still have been well above refrigeration temperature. That combination — low oxygen, low acid, low salt, no refrigeration — is a recognised risk condition for Clostridium botulinum, which grows without air; the toxin itself is heat-labile, but this paste is served straight from the mould without further cooking. The recipe gives no salt quantity, no acid, no holding temperature and no keeping limit.
- Cooked fish is not preserved fishPounding and sieving break the fish down and distribute any surface bacteria through the whole mass, and neither the pounding nor the butter involves further heat. Nothing in the method kills spores; the seal simply gives them a favourable environment.
- Shrimp adds risk, not safetyFreshly boiled shrimp is highly perishable and is being folded in cold, then held. If potted seafood interests you, use a current recipe with specified salt levels and refrigerated storage, and treat it as a short-life fresh product.
- LarderA ventilated, commonly north-facing storeroom, not a refrigerator. The instruction "keep in a cool larder" is doing a great deal of unstated work: no temperature and no keeping limit are given.
- Hair sieveA drum sieve strung with horsehair, used before wire mesh became cheap, because iron and tin discoloured acidic and delicate mixtures. A fine nylon tamis is the modern equivalent.
- MaceThe outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold as blades or ground. It is warmer and less sweet than nutmeg, and Oscar's use of both together is characteristic of Victorian fish seasoning.
- Clarified butterButter with the water and milk solids removed, which is why it was chosen as a seal — the milk solids left in whole butter spoil, and the water would separate. It sets firm and clear, but it is an air barrier only, not a preservative.
Potting is one of the oldest English keeping methods, and by the eighteenth century potted salmon, char, lampreys and shrimps were shipped considerable distances in sealed crocks under butter — potted char from the Lake District and potted shrimps from Morecambe Bay were both established regional trades. The technique moved into hotel kitchens as a thrift measure: the instruction here begins "take some cold cooked fish," which is a polite way of saying yesterday's poached salmon or turbot. The book carries the name of Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, and the finished moulds turned out onto a folded napkin with parsley belong to the cold buffet and supper-room service of the 1890s, where a pale, richly spiced paste sat alongside aspics and galantines. What the recipe does not record is that the trade version is generally thought to have relied on heavy salt and prompt sale; by the time potting reached the domestic cookbook it had become a flavouring method that merely looked like a preserving one.