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Potted Lobster
Procure a large cooked lobster or two small ones, pick out all the meat and place it with the spawn in the mortar, pound it to a paste, then mix with it one-fourth pound of fresh butter, a little pounded mace and cloves, pepper, salt and grated nutmeg. When thoroughly mixed fill some jars with the preparation, press it down tightly, leaving about one-fourth inch space at the top, and fill it up with clarified butter. When quite cold tie the jars over with white paper, and keep them in a dry closet until required for use.
This is a nineteenth-century preserving method rather than a dish to be eaten the same day, and the preserving is the part that fails. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then why the storage instruction cannot be followed.
- The hinge is the closet, not the poundingThe recipe's whole purpose is shelf storage: jars sealed with clarified butter, tied over with paper, and kept in a dry closet until wanted. That is an unrefrigerated, oxygen-excluding pack of low-acid cooked seafood, which is the exact set of conditions that favours Clostridium botulinum. The butter cap is a seal, not a preservative.
- Type E botulism and marine sourcesFish and shellfish carry non-proteolytic C. botulinum types B, E and F, which produce no off-smell or gas to warn you and can grow at temperatures well below room heat. Potted fish and seafood have a long documented history as vehicles for botulism outbreaks, which is why commercial potted products are pasteurised in-pack or sold chilled with a short date.
- No measured quantities or temperaturesThere is no acidification, no measured salt level, no heat process and no time or temperature anywhere in the method. Safe home preserving of a low-acid food requires all of those. A current, tested recipe should be used for anything intended to be kept.
- Spawn"Spawn" is the dark green roe of a hen lobster, which turns coral-red when cooked. It was prized for the colour and richness it gave potted meats. It is also the most perishable part of the animal.
- Pounded mace and clovesMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, usually described as more delicate than the nutmeg itself; both appearing in one recipe is unremarkable for the period. "Pounded" simply means ground in the mortar, whole spices being the form the instruction assumes.
- Clarified butterButter melted and separated from its milk solids and water. The solids and water are what spoil first, so clarified butter sets into a firmer, cleaner cap — the reason it was chosen for potting rather than plain melted butter.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound of butter is 4 oz, about 115 g, worked into the meat of one large lobster; the proportion of butter to meat suggests a spread rather than a portion of lobster, though the recipe does not say how it was served.
Potting is one of the older English preservation methods to survive into hotel cookery: meat, game or fish pounded to a paste, packed tight to drive out air, and sealed under a layer of fat. It predates canning by roughly two centuries and was still a familiar household method when Oscar Tschirky compiled this book in 1896, which is why a Waldorf chef could print it without comment. Potted lobster and potted shrimp were fixtures of the British breakfast and supper table, and potted shrimp in particular is still made commercially under butter today, now sold chilled with a short date. The recipe's confidence about the "dry closet" is a record of what pre-refrigeration kitchens expected a fat seal to do, and of how much of that expectation later food microbiology had to undo.