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Potted Pheasant
Pluck and draw the pheasant, wipe it clean with a damp cloth, singe it, and season the inside with pepper, salt, cloves, beaten mace and grated nutmeg. Break the breastbones and flatten them down. Put the bird in an earthen bowl with a large lump of butter, and bake it for one hour. When cooled, drain the pheasant, and leave it till cold; then put it in a large jar, the breast downwards, and pour in clarified butter to one-half inch in thickness. Tie paper over the jar, and keep it in a cool place.
This is a classic English potting method: cooked meat sealed under a layer of fat and held in a larder. The technique is the problem, and no adjustment of time or temperature within the recipe as written makes it sound.
- Why the butter seal is the hazardClarified butter poured over cooked meat creates exactly the low-acid, oxygen-free environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin. Spores survive an hour in the oven; the butter cap then removes the air that would otherwise keep them dormant.
- "A cool place" is not refrigerationA nineteenth-century larder would generally have been well above modern refrigeration temperatures, and often warmer still. Botulinum toxin production is possible above about 38F, so the storage condition assumed here sits in the danger zone for what may be weeks of keeping.
- No cure, no acid, no measured anythingThere is no saltpetre, no nitrite, no vinegar and no stated quantity of salt. Potted meats that were genuinely stable relied on heavy salting or a cure; this one relies on the butter alone, which does nothing antimicrobial.
- The bake is unspecifiedNo oven temperature is given, and a whole bird flattened in an earthenware bowl of butter for one hour may or may not reach a safe internal temperature throughout. Game birds are dense and the breast-down packing that follows only complicates matters.
- Paper is not a sealTying paper over the jar keeps dust and flies out. It does nothing to exclude contamination introduced when the bird was drawn, handled and left to go cold.
- Wild game brings its own issuesShot birds may carry lead fragments through the breast, and a bird that has been hung -- as pheasant traditionally was, sometimes for a week -- arrives in the kitchen with a bacterial load the recipe never accounts for.
- If you want potted pheasantUse a current recipe with stated internal temperatures and refrigerated storage with a defined shelf life, or treat the result as a rillette to be eaten within days rather than a preserve.
Potting is one of the oldest English larder techniques, and by the eighteenth century it was standard treatment for game, salmon, shrimps and beef tongue: cook the flesh, pack it tight to drive out air, and cap it with clarified butter. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book collects a great many such English survivals alongside the French service that made the Waldorf's reputation, and pheasant was very much a luxury item on New York menus of the period -- much of it wild-shot and sold through markets, a trade the Lacey Act of 1900 would soon begin to curtail. The recipe reads as inherited rather than invented. It is worth reading as a document of how food was kept before mechanical refrigeration reached the domestic kitchen, when the cool north-facing pantry and a half-inch of butter were the whole of the technology available.