Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Potted Veal
Potted Veal
Take a cutlet of fillet of veal weighing nearly a pound, season to taste with peppercorns, mace and cloves, place it in a saucepan that will only just hold it, fill up the pan with water and bake for three hours. Place it in a mortar and pound it fine, with salt to taste and about two ounces of butter slightly warmed. If it be for immediate use, a little of the gravy it was baked in may be used to moisten it in the mortar; if it is to be kept for any length of time, do not use anything but butter. When beaten to a fine smooth paste, put it into pots and pour over sufficient butter melted to oil to cover it to a depth of about one-fifth of an inch.
This is a preserving recipe dressed as a spread: cooked veal pounded with butter and sealed under a layer of fat so it will keep without cold storage. The cooking is sound; the keeping is not, and that is where the recipe fails for a modern kitchen.
- The butter seal is the problemPouring melted butter over the paste creates exactly the oxygen-free, low-acid, moist environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin. Spores survive the three hours of cooking, which never exceeds the temperature of boiling water, and nothing in the recipe — no measured salt, no nitrite, no acid, no pressure processing — prevents them from growing once the pot is sealed and left at room temperature. Botulinum toxin is not detectable by smell or taste. For a potted meat or terrine, use a current tested recipe with specified storage.
- "If it is to be kept for any length of time"That phrase is the whole intent of the method, and it is the part no modern cook should follow. Nineteenth-century potting relied on a cold larder and rapid household turnover; both are assumed here and neither is stated.
- No oven temperature is givenOscar's instruction to "bake for three hours" in a pan filled with water is a braise rather than a roast — the meat sits at or just below boiling throughout, whatever the oven is doing. No setting is given here; the heat is left to the cook's judgement of the range.
- "Cutlet of fillet of veal"In period English usage fillet of veal generally means the leg or top round rather than the tenderloin; a cutlet is simply a thick slice off it. A pound of meat yields only a small quantity of finished paste.
- Whole spices, whole peppercornsThe peppercorns, mace and cloves go in to perfume the cooking water; the recipe does not say whether they are removed before pounding. Mace is the outer covering of nutmeg, sold today in blades or ground; it is milder and more floral than nutmeg itself and was a common seasoning for potted meats.
- The mortarPounding to "a fine smooth paste" was hard work with a pestle; the butter binds the dried-out fibres back into something spreadable. The recipe specifies butter 'slightly warmed', not melted.
- "Butter melted to oil"This appears to mean butter taken past melting until the milk solids settle and the fat runs clear — in effect clarified butter, which was commonly used for such seals. A fifth of an inch is about 5 mm, which tells you how thin a barrier this is.
Potting is one of the oldest English methods of keeping cooked meat: the flesh is pounded fine, packed into an earthenware pot to exclude air, and sealed with a cake of clarified butter, a technique documented in household books from the seventeenth century onward and applied to beef, tongue, venison, shrimps, salmon and — as here — veal. Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book of 1896 was compiled for a large New York hotel, yet it carries dozens of entries like this one, drawn from the older English and French domestic tradition. Potted meats are often said to lie behind the later commercial potted and deviled pastes, and their decline in domestic cookery tracks the arrival of reliable refrigeration and, later, an understanding of why sealing low-acid food under fat at room temperature is a bad idea. The mace-and-cloves seasoning is a hint of the recipe's age, a seasoning long associated with potted meat.