Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Potted Fish
Mrs. Gridley.
Take out the backbone of the fish; for one weighing two pounds take a tablespoon of allspice and cloves mixed; these spices should be put into little bags of not too thick muslin; put sufficient salt directly upon each fish; then roll in cloth, over which sprinkle a little cayenne pepper; put alternate layers of fish, spice and sago in an earthen jar; cover with the best cider vinegar; cover the jar closely with a plate and over this put a covering of dough, rolled out twice the thickness of pie crust. Make the edges of paste, to adhere closely to the sides of the jar, so as to make it air-tight. Put the jar into a pot of cold water and let it boil from three to five hours, according to quantity. Ready when cold.
Sauces for "Fish and Meat" will follow "Meats."
This is a nineteenth-century keeping recipe: fish sealed under vinegar in a crock, luted shut with a dough seal and boiled for hours. The reading notes below explain the language and why the method itself is the problem.
- Why it failsThe dough seal and the long boil are meant to produce an airtight, sterile jar, but neither the temperature inside the crock nor the acidity of the pack is measured or controlled. Boiling water reaches only 212F, which does not destroy Clostridium botulinum spores; the sealed, oxygen-free interior is precisely the environment in which they germinate and produce toxin.
- The vinegar is not a guaranteeAcid can make a pack safe, but only when the finished product is verifiably below about pH 4.6 throughout. "Cover with the best cider vinegar" over salted whole fish, layered with starch or herbs, gives no way to know the final acidity, and period cider vinegar was not standardised at 5 percent as modern bottled vinegar is.
- Fish is the worst caseFish is a bad case -- fish-borne botulism is well documented among home-preserved foods, and type E strains associated with fish can grow at refrigerator temperatures. A sealed crock left at room temperature compounds the risk.
- The dough sealA rolled dough paste was one common lute for sealing crocks before screw-band jars. It excludes air well enough to feel secure while offering no evidence that the contents were ever heated adequately, which is exactly the combination that made these recipes dangerous.
- "Sago"Sago is palm starch, sold in small pearls; as written it would thicken the vinegar into a paste. It has been suggested that "sage" was intended and that this is a compositor's error. The original is genuinely ambiguous and we have not altered it.
- Spice bagsThe allspice and cloves go into thin muslin sachets so the whole spices can be lifted out rather than picked from the flesh. The technique is sound and survives in modern pickling; the preservation method around it is not.
- If you want the dishSoused and potted fish can be made safely as a short-keeping refrigerator preparation, or processed to current USDA specifications in a pressure canner. Use a current tested recipe rather than adapting this one.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes solicited from local housewives, each signed with the contributor's name, and sold to raise money for the Home for the Friendless; it is often cited as a forerunner of the American community cookbook. "Mrs. Gridley" is one of those neighbours, and her potted fish belongs to the tradition of sousing: oily fish such as herring or mackerel, boned, spiced and cooked slowly under vinegar until the small bones soften. Luting a jar shut with a rolled dough paste is an older technique that appears in eighteenth-century English receipt books. What the recipe cannot show is any awareness of why the method sometimes killed people; botulism was not identified as a bacterial toxin until the 1890s, and safe home-canning practice for low-acid foods was not established in American kitchens until well into the twentieth century.