Omelette and a Glass of Wine (35 page)

That crust of yellow butter so important to the true English potted meats and pastes as opposed to the Franglais and the factory-produced versions, does perhaps need a little more explanation than the late Major Connolly, who refers to it throughout his little work as ‘melted butter’, thought necessary to clarify. Clarified in fact is what it is, or should be, that butter. And since for the successful confection and storage of many, although not all, potted meats and fish, clarified butter is a necessary adjunct, it seems only fair to warn readers that the process does involve a little bother, although a trifling one compared to the services rendered by a supply of this highly satisfactory sealing, mixing, and incidentally, frying ingredient.

Storage of Potted Foods

Concerning the keeping qualities of home-potted foods, there are some essential points to make. First, all juices and liquid which come from fish or meat to be potted, whether especially cooked for the purpose or whether left-over from a joint,
must be drained off before the food is pounded or packed up for potting.
Because stock or gravy from salmon, game or beef, let us say, happens to look rich and taste delicious, that does not mean it will not go bad if it separates from the meat or fish in question and settles to the bottom of the pot. We all know what happens when jellied gravy and sediment is left at the bottom of a bowl of dripping or lard.

It is also important to eliminate as far as possible any air pockets in pots of meat and fish. This means that the pots must be packed very full and the contents pressed and pressed until they are as tightly packed as possible.

Finally, make sure that the layer of melted clarified butter with which the pots are covered is sufficiently thick to seal the contents completely. Given these conditions there is no reason why potted
meat and fish should not keep, in a correctly ventilated larder, for several weeks. ‘Game to be sent to distant places’, wrote Meg Dods, long before the advent of the refrigerator ‘and potted without cutting up the birds will keep for a month.’ Once broached, the contents of a pot should be stored in the refrigerator and quickly consumed. For this reason, potted meats and fish are essentially delicacies to be packed into small pots. Failing the old-fashioned neat white pots described by Major Connolly use miniature white china soufflé dishes or ramekins, small straight-sided glass jars, foie gras or pâté terrines, or white, covered pots such as those associated with Gentleman’s Relish – still a favourite fish paste. Apart from the dimensions and shape of the pot, an important point to remember is that whatever the colour or decoration on the
outside
of the pots or jars used for potted meats, the
inside
should be of a pale colour and preferably white, so that the delicate creams and pinks of the contents with their layer of yellow butter look fresh and appetizing against their background.

When and How to Serve Potted Foods and Pastes

‘A noble breakfast,’ says George Borrow of the morning meal offered him at an inn at Bala in North Wales, ‘there was tea and coffee, a goodly white loaf and butter, there were a couple of eggs and two mutton chops – there was boiled and pickled salmon – fried trout … also potted trout and potted shrimps …’ A few weeks later he returns in search of more country delicacies. He is not disappointed. ‘What a breakfast! Pot of hare; ditto of trout; pot of prepared shrimps; dish of plain shrimps; tin of sardines; beautiful beef-steak; eggs, muffins, large loaf, and butter, not forgetting capital tea…’

George Borrow was writing of
Wild Wales
in the eighteen-fifties. When you come to analyse his splendid breakfasts you find that with slight changes he might almost be describing a nineteen-sixties, chop-house revival period, West End restaurant lunch. The potted shrimps, the trout, the steak, the pot of hare (now the chef’s
terrine de lièvre
), the mutton chops (now lamb cutlets), the salmon, now smoked rather than pickled, are very much with us still. The March of Progress has alas transformed the goodly white bread into that unique substance, restaurateur’s toast, while tea and coffee are replaced by gin-and-tonic or a bottle of white wine, and for my part I would say none the worse for that. Tea with a fish breakfast or
coffee with beefsteaks have never been my own great favourites in the game of what to drink with what.

Here we are then with plenty of ideas for an easy and simple English lunch; potted tongue or game followed by a simple hot egg dish; or smoked salmon paste with butter and brown bread to precede grilled lamb chops, or oven-baked sole, or fillet steak if you are rich. For a high-tea or supper meal spread smoked haddock paste on fingers of hot toast and arrange them in a circle around a dish of scrambled eggs. For cocktail parties, use smoked salmon butter, fresh salmon paste, sardine or tunny fish butter, potted cheese, as fillings for the smallest of small sandwiches. Fish, meat and cheese pastes do not combine successfully with vol-au-vent cases, pastry or biscuits, but in sandwiches or spread on fingers of coarse brown bread they will be greeted as a blessed change from sticky canapés and messy dips. Stir a spoonful or two of potted crab or lobster (minus the butter covering) into fresh cream for eggs
en cocotte
, into a béchamel sauce to go over poached eggs or a
gratin
of sole fillets. And as Mrs Johnstone, alias Meg Dods, author of the admirable
Housewife’s Manual
of 1826 wrote, ‘What is left of the clarified butter (from potted lobster or crab) will be very relishing for sauces’ while ‘any butter from potted tongue or chicken remaining uneaten will afterwards be useful for frying meat and for pastry for pies’.

Recipes

CLARIFIED BUTTER

In a large frying or sauté pan put a slab of butter (I use a good quality butter and find that it pays to prepare 2 lb. at a time since it keeps almost indefinitely and is immeasurably superior to fresh butter for frying bread, croquettes, rissoles, fish cakes, veal escalopes, fish
à la meunière
and a score of other tricky cooking jobs). Let the butter melt over very gentle heat. It must not brown, but should be left to bubble for a few seconds before being removed from the heat and left to settle.

Have ready a piece of butter muslin wrung out in warm water, doubled, and laid in a sieve standing over the bowl or deep wide jar in which the butter is to be stored. Filter the butter while it is still warm. For storage keep the jar, covered, in the refrigerator.

The object of clarifying butter is to rid it of water, buttermilk
sediment, salt and any foreign matter which (a) for purposes of frying cause the butter to blacken and burn, and (b) render it susceptible to eventual rancidity. The clarification process also expels air and causes the butter to solidify as it cools, making it a highly effective sealing material. In French cookery clarified beef suet, pigs’ lard and goose fat are used in precisely the same way to seal pâtés and home-preserved pork and goose. These are the famous
confits
which are the French equivalents of our eighteenth and nineteenth century potted meat, game and poultry. The delicious pork and goose
rillettes
and
rillons
of Western France are also close relations of English potted meats – in other words cooked and shredded or pounded meat packed into pots
after
cooking, as opposed to the pâtés and terrines which are made from raw ingredients cooked directly in the pots or the crust in which they are to be stored and served.

POTTED TONGUE

To my mind this is the best and most subtle of all English potted meat inventions. My recipe is adapted from John Farley’s
The London Art of Cookery
published in 1783. Farley was master of the London Tavern, and an unusually lucid writer. One deduces that the cold table at the London Tavern must have been exceptionally good, for all Farley’s sideboard dishes, cold pies, hams, spiced beef joints and potted meats are thought out with much care, are set down in detail and show a delicate and educated taste.

Ingredients and proportions for potted tongue are ½ lb. each of cooked, brined and/or smoked ox tongue and clarified butter, a salt-spoonful of ground mace, a turn or two of black or white pepper from the mill.

Chop the tongue and, with 5 oz. (weighed after clarifying) of the butter, reduce it to a paste in the blender or liquidizer, season it, pack it tightly down into a pot or pots, smooth over the top, cover, and leave in the refrigerator until very firm. Melt the remaining 3 oz. of clarified butter and pour it, tepid, over the tongue paste, so that it sets in a sealing layer about one eighth of an inch thick. When completely cold, cover the pot with foil or greaseproof paper. The amount given will fill one ¾ to 1 pint shallow soufflé dish, although I prefer to pack my potted tongue in two or three smaller containers.
Venison can be potted in the same way as tongue, and makes one of the best of all sandwich fillings. Salt beef makes another excellent potted meat.

TO POT HAM WITH CHICKENS

Readers interested in more than the bare formula of a dish will appreciate the charming, simple and well explained recipe below. Apart from the eighteenth-century country house atmosphere evoked by the writing, we get also a very clear picture of the manner in which these potted meats were presented and a substantial hint as to the devising of other permutations and combinations of poultry, game and meat for potting:

‘Take as much lean of boiled ham as you please, and half the quantity of fat, cut it as thin as possible, beat it very fine in a mortar, with a little oiled butter, beaten mace, pepper and salt, pot part of it into a china pot, then beat the white part of a fowl with a very little seasoning; it is to qualify the ham, put a lay of chicken, then one of ham, then chicken at the top, press it hard down, and when it is cold, pour clarified butter over it; when you send it to the table cut out a thin slice in the form of half a diamond, and lay it round the edge of your pot.’

Elizabeth Raffald,
The Experienced English Housekeeper
, 1769

POTTED CHICKEN LIVERS

This is a recipe which produces a rich, smooth and gamey-flavoured mixture, rather like a very expensive French pâté, at a fraction of the price and with very little fuss.

Ingredients are 4 oz. of chicken livers (frozen livers are perfectly adequate); 3 oz. of butter; a tablespoon of brandy; seasonings.

Frozen chicken livers are already cleaned, so if they are being used the only preliminary required is the thawing-out process. If you have bought fresh livers, put them in a bowl of tepid, slightly salted water and leave them for about a couple of hours. Then look at each one very carefully, removing any yellowish pieces, which may give the finished dish a bitter taste.

Heat 1 oz. of butter in a small heavy frying pan. In this cook the livers for about 5 minutes, turning them over constantly. The outsides should be browned but not toughened, the insides should remain pink but not raw. Take them from the pan with a perforated spoon and transfer them to a mortar or the liquidizer goblet.

To the buttery juices in the pan add the brandy and let it sizzle for
a few seconds. Pour it over the chicken livers. Add a teaspoon of salt, and a sprinkling of milled pepper. Put in the remaining 2 oz. of butter, softened but not melted. Pound or whizz the whole mixture to a very smooth paste. Taste for seasoning. Press into a little china, glass or glazed earthenware pot or terrine and smooth down the top. Cover, and chill in the refrigerator. Serve with hot crisp dry toast.

If to be made in larger quantities and stored, seal the little pots with a layer of clarified butter, melted and poured over the chilled paste.

Rum (white, for preference) makes a sound alternative to the brandy in this recipe. Surprisingly, perhaps, gin is also very successful.

N.B. Since this dish is a very rich one, I sometimes add to the chicken livers an equal quantity of blanched, poached pickled pork (
not
bacon) or failing pickled pork, a piece of fresh belly of pork, salted overnight, then gently poached for about 30 minutes. Add the cooked pork, cut in small pieces to the chicken livers in the blender.

POTTED GAME

Grouse ‘potted whole, stowed singly into pots with clarified butter poured over’ as described by Professor Saintsbury
¹
(the old boy didn’t miss much) are infinitely enticing, exceedingly extravagant with butter and not very practical for these days, but you can make one young cooked grouse or partridge go a very long way by the simple method of chopping the flesh, freed from all skin and sinew with about one quarter of its weight in mild, rather fat, cooked ham. You then put the chopped grouse and ham in the electric blender with 4 tablespoons of clarified butter to every ½ lb. of the mixture. Add salt if necessary, a few grains of cayenne, a few drops of lemon juice. Reduce the mixture to a paste or purée. Pack it in to small straight-sided china, glazed earthenware or glass pots. Put these into the refrigerator until the meat is very cold and firm. Then seal the pots with a layer of just-melted clarified butter.

Potted game is most delicious and delicate with hot thin crisp brown toast for tea or as a first course at lunch.

It goes without saying that old birds can, equally, be used for potting, but they are much less delicate, need very long slow and
thorough cooking, a larger proportion of fat ham (or pickled pork but
not
smoked bacon), and must be carefully drained of their cooking juices before they are prepared for chopping and pounding, otherwise sediment seeps through, collects at the bottom of the little jars and causes mould.

RILLETTES OR POTTED PORK IN THE FRENCH MANNER

This very famous charcutiers’ or pork butchers’ speciality is native to Southern Brittany, Anjou and Touraine. It could be described as the French equivalent of our potted meat – although it is very different in texture and taste.