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Potted Salmon
Select a piece of salmon, but do not wash it; wipe it very dry and scale it. Place it on a dish, sprinkle salt over, and rub it in well. Let the fish remain in the salt until the latter has all melted and drained away, the dish being placed in a slightly sloping position so that it may drain off as it dissolves. When ready place the fish in a deep bakingpan, together with a seasoning of bruised mace, cloves, whole peppers, and three or four bay leaves; put plenty of butter over it, cover the pan closely, and bake the salmon. When well done, drain the fish from the liquor, press it into pots, and allow it to become quite cold; then pour into each pot a sufficient quantity of clarified butter to cover.
This is a preserving recipe, not a dish for immediate eating, and that is where it fails. The points below explain what the instructions leave out and why the omissions matter.
- The butter seal is the problemClarified butter poured over cooked fish creates an oxygen-free layer, which is precisely the environment Clostridium botulinum exploits. Fish is the classic vehicle for type E botulinum, and neither salt-rubbing nor baking reliably destroys the spores. Potted fish held at room temperature under a fat seal is one of the recognised historical causes of botulism outbreaks.
- No cure is actually measuredThe salt is applied by eye, then deliberately allowed to drain away, so the finished fish carries an unknown and probably low salt concentration. A safe cure depends on a known salt-to-water ratio in the finished product; "sprinkle salt over and rub it in well" gives you no way to know what you have.
- No temperature, no time"Bake the salmon" and "when well done" are the only cooking directions given. The recipe names no oven heat at all, and there is no internal temperature target and no holding time, which a preserved product requires.
- Do not wash itNot rinsing the fish is consistent with a preference for keeping the flesh dry when potting, though the recipe gives no reason. It also leaves whatever surface bacteria the fish arrived with in place, and the salmon then sits draining at room temperature for an unspecified period.
- Storage is never addressedThe recipe ends at "cover" and says nothing about how long the pots keep or where they should be kept. In 1896 that meant a cold larder or cellar, temperatures a modern reader has no equivalent for and cannot assume.
- If you want potted fishUse a current recipe from a food-safety authority or a modern preserving manual, one that specifies salt percentage, internal temperature and refrigerated shelf life.
- Terms in the original"Bruised mace" is whole mace blades crushed to release their oil; mace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed. "Pots" are small straight-sided earthenware jars, and clarified butter is butter with the water and milk solids removed so the fat sets clear and hard.
Potting was the standard British method of keeping cooked meat and fish before canning: the flesh was salted, baked or stewed with spice, pressed into jars and sealed under a layer of butter that hardened into a protective seal. Newcastle and the Tweed salmon fisheries did a substantial trade in potted salmon through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sending it to London and abroad in sealed kits and jars, and the technique is a fixture of English cookery books well before Hannah Glasse, appearing already in seventeenth-century collections. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection says less about what the Waldorf's kitchens served nightly than about how such books were assembled collection's size and character suggest that many entries, preserving recipes included, were drawn from earlier household manuals rather than from the hotel's own service, at a moment when commercial canning was already making the whole practice obsolete.