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Potted Reed Birds
Take the butter off the top of the potted birds, throw them, one at a time, into a saucepan of boiling water and leave them for half a minute, then remove and dry them thoroughly both inside and out. When all the birds have thus been treated leave them until quite cold; then season them with salt, pepper and powdered mace, pack them closely in jars and pour clarified butter on the top. When potted birds are sent a long way the odor is often so bad as to be unendurable from the rankness of the butter. If prepared as described above they will be as though freshly potted.
This is not a recipe for cooking birds but for rescuing already-potted ones whose butter has gone rancid in transit. Both halves of it — the bird and the method of keeping it — put the dish out of reach today.
- The bird is protected"Reed bird" in nineteenth-century American markets meant the bobolink, shot in enormous numbers in the rice and reed marshes of the Atlantic coast during autumn migration. The bobolink is protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act; killing, possessing or selling one is a federal offense, and no legal substitute trade exists.
- Nothing here reaches a safe temperatureThe birds are dipped in boiling water for thirty seconds. That washes the surface and no more; the interior of a small bird, already cooked or part-cooked at some earlier point and then held under butter for an unknown period, is never brought to or held at a pasteurizing temperature.
- The seal is the hazardClarified butter poured over meat in a jar creates an oxygen-free layer. That is precisely the environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate, and this potting is done with no measured salt, no nitrite, no acid and no heat process — the only stated seasoning is "salt, pepper and powdered mace" to taste.
- Held cold, then notThe recipe describes potted birds being sent a long way and arriving so rank as to be "unendurable"; nothing suggests they travelled chilled. Rancid butter is a flavor problem, but the same journey is a food-safety problem that reworking the butter does nothing to address.
- Why the trick worked at allThe fix is essentially cosmetic: strip the spoiled fat, rinse, dry, reseason, reseal. It restores the appearance and smell of freshness without altering what has happened inside the meat.
- If you want the techniquePotted meats and butter-sealed confits are still made, but only to a current recipe with specified cure quantities, cooking temperatures and refrigerated storage times. Use one of those rather than this.
Reed birds — bobolinks — were a familiar luxury of the American table in the 1880s and 1890s, sold by the dozen in city markets and served whole, often on toast. They fattened in the rice and reed marshes of the Atlantic coast on their way south, which is the likely source of the market name, and they were shot in such volume that the species' decline is often cited among the pressures behind the early protective legislation that culminated in the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. Potting under butter was one common way to move small game any distance before reliable refrigeration, and the fact that the book bothered to print a method for reviving birds that arrived stinking suggests how routine both the shipping and the spoilage were. The entry belongs to a brief window: within roughly two decades of this book, the dish was not merely unfashionable but illegal.