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Potted Venison
Cut some cold cooked venison into thin slices. Put one-half pound of butter into a stewpan with a small quantity of spices, such as cloves, grated nutmeg and white pepper, and place it over the fire. When melted, put in the meat, and for every pound add one tablespoonful of currant jelly and one wineglassful of red wine. Allow the meat to simmer in the butter for twenty minutes, then remove it, mince it fine and pound it in a mortar. When quite smooth, pass the meat through a fine sieve and mix the cooking-butter and gravy with it. Pack it in small jars and press it down tightly, leaving a clear one-fourth inch space at the top. Fill the jars with clarified butter, and when it is cold, tie the jars over tightly and put them away for use.
This is a potting recipe: cooked meat pounded to a paste, packed into jars and sealed under a layer of butter for keeping. The keeping is the problem, and it is not a small one.
- The butter seal is the hazardA layer of clarified butter over a low-acid meat paste creates exactly the oxygen-free environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin. Spores survive a twenty-minute simmer in butter without difficulty, and the finished paste is neither acidic, salty nor dry enough to hold them in check.
- "Put them away for use"The original assumes a cold larder and consumption within days or weeks. There is no processing step, no measured salt or nitrite, no acidification and no temperature given for storage. Nothing in the method makes the jars shelf-stable, and botulinum toxin gives no warning in smell, taste or appearance.
- The pounding and sieving compound itMincing, pounding in a mortar and passing through a sieve reintroduces surface bacteria throughout the whole mass after cooking, and the paste is never reheated afterwards. Any contamination from the mortar, sieve or hands ends up sealed in the centre of the jar.
- Venison specificallyGame that has been shot and dressed in the field may carry a heavier and more variable bacterial load than commercially butchered meat, and the original gives no guidance on the source, condition or age of the "cold cooked venison" being used. If you want potted game today, follow a current tested recipe that treats it as a short-life refrigerated product.
- Archaic measures, for reading the textA wineglassful in a book of this period is about two fluid ounces, a quarter cup. The half pound of butter is for the whole batch; the jelly and wine are specified per pound of meat, so the seasoning scales with the venison and the butter does not.
- Currant jellyCurrant jelly is a conventional accompaniment to venison, and it does the same job here as it does beside a roast haunch: a sharp sweetness against the dry, lean meat. It is a seasoning, not a preservative, and the quantity is far too small to acidify anything.
Potting is one of the oldest English methods of keeping cooked meat, and by the nineteenth century it had settled into the form given here: the meat cooked in butter, pounded smooth with spice, packed down hard to exclude air and sealed under a cap of clarified butter. It predates canning, and the same technique produced the potted shrimps, potted beef and potted tongue sold commercially in Britain and America. Venison was a luxury on the American hotel table of the 1890s, reaching it both from game dealers and from private shooting.