Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Potted Liver
Put the required amount of any kind of liver with a little highly seasoned stock into a stewpan and braise it. When done and quite tender, cut it up very fine and put it into a mortar and pound to a paste, adding enough of the stock to moisten. Melt, strain and add to the paste one-fourth pound of butter, season with salt, pepper, ground allspice and mace, and pass the whole through a fine hair-sieve; then place it in jars, cover with melted butter, and stand the jars in a cool place until wanted. Poultry livers may be treated in the same manner; if truffles or mushrooms are added they are very good imitations of foies gras.
This is a pâté in all but name, and the whole thing turns on not overcooking the liver. Braise it only until the pink is gone at the center; liver held past that point turns grainy and metallic, and no amount of butter or sieving will bring it back.
- Quantities are left to youThe recipe gives only one fixed measure: a quarter pound of butter. As a working ratio, 4 oz of butter to 1 lb of trimmed liver gives a paste stiff enough to slice when cold. Stock is added by feel, a tablespoon at a time, until the paste just falls from the spoon.
- Braise, brieflyTrim membrane and any large ducts, cover the liver barely with the seasoned stock, and hold it at a bare simmer — calf or lamb liver in slices needs 8-12 minutes, chicken livers 4-5. The recipe asks for the liver 'done and quite tender', but longer cooking than that gains nothing.
- Mortar and hair-sieveA food processor does the pounding in 30 seconds. The hair-sieve — a fine tamis of woven horsehair — is the step people skip and shouldn't: pressing the purée through a fine-mesh sieve with a stiff spatula removes the connective grit that a blade only chops smaller.
- Melt, strain the butterStraining melted butter here means clarifying it: melt gently, skim the foam, pour off the golden fat and leave the milky solids behind. Clarified butter blends smoothly into the paste and sets clear as a seal.
- SpicingFor 1 lb of liver, start with 1/4 teaspoon ground allspice, 1/8 teaspoon mace and a scant teaspoon of salt, then correct. Mace is the outer covering of nutmeg and is milder and more floral; it turns up often in potting recipes, and nutmeg is not quite a substitute.
- The butter seal is not preservationA "cool place" in 1896 meant a larder, and the butter cap was expected to keep air off potted meat for weeks. It will not do that safely. Treat this as fresh pâté: refrigerate at once and eat within three days, or freeze it.
- The foie gras claimChicken livers with a spoonful of chopped mushroom or a shaving of truffle give a rich, smooth spread, but they are not foie gras and the texture is coarser. A tablespoon of brandy or Madeira added to the stock does more for the resemblance than the truffle does.
- Yield and servingA pound of liver with the butter makes roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of paste, enough for eight to ten as a first course. Bring it to just below room temperature before serving; straight from the refrigerator the butter mutes everything.
Potting is one of the oldest English methods of keeping cooked meat: the flesh was pounded to a paste, packed tight to drive out air, and sealed under a layer of clarified butter, a practice well established in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century household books for beef, tongue, game and fish. By the time Oscar Tschirky compiled his Cook Book in 1896, potted meats survived in hotel kitchens as luncheon and buffet spreads. The closing line is the telling one: American diners of the 1890s knew what foie gras was and wanted it, and a great deal of Gilded Age cookery consisted of reaching that effect with cheaper materials, a shaving of truffle standing in for the imported terrine.