Thanks for joining us today on 18th century cooking I'm Jon Townsend and
today we'll be preparing potted meats in the 18th century style
in the past we've done a whole series on food preservation techniques in the 18th century and
we touched on at the time the idea of potting or potting meats and but we didn't get a chance to
do it today we are going to pot this beef potted meat recipes can be very complex and they can take
a while to do but I wanted to find something very simple it took a while but there's a very simple
potted beef recipe in Charlotte Mason's "A Lady's Assistant" from 1777 and this one's called "to pot
cold beef" and it's actually the recipe starts after you have a cut of beef that's already been
cooked and you want to pot it maybe like you've eaten half of it but you want to preserve the
next half over the next several weeks and so to get started with this one I've actually taken a
chuck roast and you need to cook that well so that it falls apart the best way to do that really is
either to cook it in a Dutch oven for two or three or even four hours at a nice low temperature or if
you want to cheat in a modern oven or a modern kitchen you could use your slow cooker and just
put it on low and and let your chuck roast cook overnight just cover this over with water or if
you want to add a little bit of flavor in it you could use an cider or something like that in there
to give it some liquid make sure to cover that up in the time period these recipes they would
actually say to use a ceramic vessel to bake your meat in and then cover it over with paper so you
want to trap that moisture and that's the idea here we want a a very very moist and fall-apart
kind of meat so here's our finished meat and you can see how amazingly tender it is we I wanted
something that was just fall apart and that's what we're looking for here what we need to do
with this meat is actually tease it apart tear it apart and remove all the fat or in any kind
of sinews in it we want just plain straight meat that's all first we put our meat into the bowl and
now we're gonna put in some more spices let's add another bit of salt and some pepper and she also
calls for some nutmeg or some mace in there as well to help season this and then let's add some
butter I don't know she doesn't call for an exact amount so let's say 1/3 as much in weight as the
amount of meat that you have here now that we've got all our ingredients we need to pulverize this
pound this into a mix that's just very very smooth like a pate that's what we're looking for here so
our meat is nice and pulverized is very fine she even says sometimes referring to it change
in color it will like turn yellow which means you can tell it's very finely pulverized that's what
we're looking for now it's time to put it into the pots and she actually in some of the recipes
mentions using a smaller pot like this you want to have a pot that's not too big because once you
break the seal on this it's gonna start to go bad so you don't want to have a large pot you want to
have a one or two serving kind of pot that way you can use it all at once these pots are available on
our website I'll make sure to put a link down in the description section pack it tightly into the
bottom of the pots we're trying to get rid of any air pockets and we're gonna fill it up to within
say about an inch or if your pots really shallow say a half inch to the top but we wanna have our
we want to leave some spot at the top for our clarified butter when we get done packing these
pots it's hard to find a good safe recipe one that's easy to do for potted meat the trick is
at this stage that we can't just pour clarified butter on these because they would go bad but
some of the recipes actually call for taking these pots before they get the clarified butter
putting them in the oven and warming them back up to temperature say 200 250 degrees for 10 or
15 minutes we want to make sure that all the meat is basically pasteurized in these pots so that's
what we're going to do with these we're going to set these aside and I'm gonna take them and
I'm going to put in in the oven for at about 200 250 degrees for 10 or 15 minutes however
long it takes to get it so that they're heated all the way through then we can bring them back
once your little pots are heated fully up to temperature you can bring them out of
the oven and while they're still warm you want to pour clarified butter on
top you want at least a quarter of an inch probably a half inch or maybe a
whole inch of clarified butter up on top of these little pots
here they are and we they finally cooled off I did have issues with the clarified butter
it shrinks just like wax does when you're making wax candles if you've ever done that
the wax will kind of shrink and it'll give you a cavity in the center so you need to kind of keep
filling this up depending on how much clarified butter you put in there that's why you want to
put a nice thick layer so even if it shrinks it doesn't shrink away from the meat completely to
make them last a little bit longer they should have another covering to put on top to protect
even the clarified butter so you can put a little cloth on there and tie that off
that's why these have a little ring around them so you can tie them off and the fabric stays on
you could use something like a hog's bladder and we have the imitation hog's bladder on
the website that's another even better seal for these to keep these longer in the 18th century
they would have stored these down in their cellar where it was nice and cool and even
then they did not expect these to last very long generally the recipes say that they'll be good
for a month or six weeks maybe two months at the max so yeah in our modern context you'll
want to store these in the refrigerator until you're ready use them and they should be good
and isn't this interesting it's very similar to say what what would happen it's sort of
like canning right you you get all these things up to temperature and then you try to seal the
air away from them it's exactly what we're doing with this so I've got some toast here to try this
out so let's crack open one of these and find out exactly how it tastes and you know there aren't a
lot of directions it doesn't say how they would actually end up using this potted meat but I'm
gonna guess that they would have it on toasts or crackers or something like that let's find out
wonderful flavor tastes great especially on something like the toasts all those little spices
come out I might add more nutmeg to it but it's got wonderful texture and a wonderful taste and
it is one of the ways that they preserved meat over time instead of having a salted beef they
many times would have a product like this and it was really nice because you can take these
with you if you're going someplace and you want to take some food with you it has its pot with
it and it's ready to eat whenever you are you don't even need toasts or crackers or anything
like that you can just scoop right in there and eat it if you're hungry oh a really interesting
way of preserving things almost like canning today very very great this one was really interesting it
was fun to research I hope you give it a chance especially if you're a reenactor this would be
wonderful to put into your your living history persona you could take one of these to an event
that would be great and if you're just somebody out there and who's interested in history it's
a great little experiment to try at home I want to thank you for coming along as we
experiment as we try these things as we savor the flavors and the aromas of the 18th century