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Potted Mutton
Chop up some cold cooked mutton, remove all the skin and sinew, and pound it in a mortar with half its bulk of cooked bacon. Season with allspice, salt and pepper to taste, place it in a jar in a saucepan of water and boil till the mass is warmed quite through. Take out the jar, stir frequently until the meat is nearly cold, squeeze it into small pots, let it remain for a day, then cover with clarified butter or hot mutton suet so as to exclude the air.
This is a potting recipe, meaning it is a preservation method rather than a dish to be eaten the day it is made, and that is exactly where it fails by current standards. The notes below explain the terms and then the specific problem.
- What potting means hereCooked meat is pounded to a paste, pressed into small pots to drive out air, and sealed under a layer of fat. The fat cap is the whole point: it was intended to keep the meat for weeks in a cool larder without refrigeration.
- The fat seal creates the hazardAn airtight layer of clarified butter or mutton suet over a low-acid meat paste makes a textbook anaerobic environment. That is the condition Clostridium botulinum requires to germinate and produce toxin, and the toxin is odourless and tasteless.
- No kill stepThe jar is stood in a saucepan of water and boiled only until the mass is "warmed quite through." A water bath cannot exceed boiling point, and botulinum spores survive ordinary boiling, so nothing in the method makes the interior of a sealed pot of meat safe for storage.
- No cure, no measurementThere is no nitrite, no measured salt concentration, no acidification and no stated storage temperature. Allspice, salt and pepper "to taste" is seasoning, not preservation.
- "Let it remain for a day"The pots stand for a full day before the fat seal goes on, and no storage temperature is given. Pounding cooked meat by hand and then holding it for hours as it cools is extended time in the range in which bacteria grow, before the anaerobic seal is even applied.
- Clarified butterButter melted and separated from its milk solids and water. It was used for potting precisely because it sets hard and keeps better than whole butter, but a clean fat is not a sterile one and it does nothing to the meat beneath it.
- If you want potted muttonUse a current recipe that treats it as a short-life refrigerated spread with a stated cold-storage window, not as a preserve.
Potting was the English answer to the problem of Monday's cold joint: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century household books are full of potted beef, potted hare, potted lampreys and potted char, all pounded in a mortar with spice and sealed under clarified butter for the larder. Mutton, being cheap, plentiful and rather assertive in flavour, was a natural candidate, and the half-measure of bacon here is doing real work, adding fat and salt to a lean, dry meat. The mortar and the fat seal both belong to a world before mechanical refrigeration was general; the domestic icebox and then the refrigerator eventually made the technique decorative rather than necessary.