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Potted Pork
Cut into nice-sized pieces a couple of pounds of lean pork and line an earthenware jar with chopped beef-suet, put the pieces of meat in, with a piece of mace and dust over with salt and pepper; pour in one and a half breakfast cupfuls of water and cover over with chopped suet. Tie a stout piece of paper very tightly over the jar and put it in a moderate oven for three hours, then remove the jar and leave it until the following day. Take the pieces of pork out of the jar, place them in a mortar and pound them to a smooth paste, adding salt and pepper if necessary, together with any other seasoning that may be liked; press the meat into small jars, leaving about half an inch space at the top of each, which fill up with clarified suet; tie the jars over and place them in dry cupboards until required for use.
This is a British-style potted meat: pork baked under suet, pounded, packed into jars and sealed with fat for storage at room temperature. The cooking is sound; the storage method is what makes it unmakeable today.
- Why the fat seal is the problemSealing cooked meat under a layer of suet creates exactly the oxygen-free, low-acid, low-salt environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin. Three hours in a moderate oven kills vegetative bacteria but not spores, and nothing in the recipe stops them growing afterwards.
- No measured cureTraditional keeping meats relied on heavy salt, and often saltpetre, in weighed proportions. Here the salt is only "dust over" and "if necessary" — seasoning quantities, not preserving ones. There is no measurable barrier to microbial growth.
- "Dry cupboards until required"Ambient storage for an indefinite period is the specific instruction that fails. Botulinum toxin is odourless and tasteless and does not spoil the meat visibly, so there is no warning sign before the jar is eaten.
- The pounding stepWorking the cooked pork in a mortar and repacking it reintroduces handling contamination after the only heat step in the process, into a product that will then sit at ambient temperature and airless.
- If you want potted porkUse a current recipe with specified refrigeration and a stated shelf life of days, not months. Do not adapt this one by adding time or temperature of your own.
- For reading the originalA "breakfast cupful" in this period is usually reckoned at about 8-10 fl oz, so roughly 12-15 fl oz of water in total; "a moderate oven" is generally taken as somewhere in the region of 325-375F. Mace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold today in blades or ground.
Potting was the standard English answer to keeping cooked meat before refrigeration: the flesh was baked slowly, pounded fine, packed tight to exclude air and capped with clarified fat, a technique closely related to French rillettes and to the potted beef, ham and shrimps that filled Victorian larders and picnic hampers. Suet, the hard fat from around beef kidneys, sets firm and stays solid at room temperature, though clarified butter was the usual English potting seal. Its appearance in a Waldorf-Astoria book is a reminder that a grand hotel kitchen was still working through the whole inherited repertoire of Anglo-American housekeeping, thrift preparations included; Clostridium botulinum was identified in the 1890s, but the hazard in home-potted and home-canned low-acid foods was not widely appreciated until the 1920s.