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Potted Rabbit
Draw, skin and clean two or three young rabbits, chop off the hind legs at the thigh, and put them together with all the flesh into a saucepan, packing them in as tightly as possible and sprinkling them with powdered mace and allspice, pepper, salt and cayenne to taste. Place several large lumps of butter on the top, which should be as flat as possible, cover with the lid, put the saucepan in a slow oven and bake gently for two hours and a half. Allow the meat to remain in the pan for two or three days, then put it into pots, cover the tops with hot butter, let this cool and the meat is then ready for use. The livers may also be added if desired and are an improvement.
This is a potting recipe — a pre-refrigeration preservation method — and its keeping steps are the reason it cannot be followed today. The notes below explain where it fails rather than how to adapt it.
- The two or three days in the panAfter baking, the recipe has the cooked meat stand in its own fat for two or three days before potting, at whatever temperature the larder happens to be; no temperature is specified. In a modern kitchen that is exactly the window in which Clostridium perfringens and Staphylococcus aureus multiply in cooked meat, and no later step reheats it. This alone puts the recipe out of range.
- The butter sealA layer of hot butter poured over meat and left to set creates a low-oxygen environment at ambient temperature. That is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum growth in a low-acid food, and botulinum toxin is not detectable by smell, taste or appearance. Modern potted meats are refrigerated and treated as a few days' fresh food, not as a preserve.
- No measured cureThere is no salt concentration, no nitrite, no acid and no processing temperature given anywhere — only "salt to taste." Safe curing and canning depend on measured quantities and verified times; seasoning to taste does not preserve anything.
- Wild rabbit and tularemia"Draw, skin and clean" assumes the cook is butchering the animal. Wild rabbits and hares can carry Francisella tularensis, which is transmissible through cuts and abrasions during skinning and gutting. This is a hazard of the handling, not of the cooking.
- The liversAdded liver is likely to shorten the keeping life of a potted meat, since offal spoils faster than muscle. In the original scheme it is an improvement in flavour; in the keeping scheme it is a further liability.
- What the oven direction meantFor the record, a 'slow oven' in a book of this date is usually taken as somewhere around 250-300F, and the tightly packed pan with lumps of butter on top makes this a confit-style braise in butter and its own juices. The cooking method is sound; it is the storage that is not.
- If you want the dishUse a current potted-meat or rillettes recipe with refrigeration times and temperatures stated.
Potting is one of the oldest English methods of keeping cooked meat: pack it tight so there is no air, cook it slowly in its own fat, then seal the surface with clarified butter. Game, tongue, shrimps and cheese were all potted, and the result travelled well and served cold at breakfast or supper. Rabbit was cheap and plentiful enough in the nineteenth century that potting it was thrift rather than luxury, and mace, allspice and cayenne were among the usual potting spices — warm, dry, and strong enough to carry through a fatty cold preparation. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896), amid the elaborate service of the Waldorf, is a reminder that a great hotel kitchen still ran on an older domestic repertoire. What the recipe also records, plainly, is how much of that repertoire depended on cool larders and on standards of risk that were simply different from ours.