Special bonus double entendre miscellany: It’s a crock, not a wheel.

Most universities call it something. In England, Cambridge has ‘iDiscover’ and Oxford the acronym ‘SOLO,’ descriptive enough but absent inspiration. In the Ivy League, Columbia also resorts to acronym, ‘CLIO,’ which seems symbolically stunted given the eight other muses. Harvard has yet another unimaginative name, the acronym ‘HOLLIS,’ Yale the prosaic ‘Orbis’ but neither Cornell nor Dartmouth or Princeton bothers with any name. Penn calls it ‘Franklin’ for its founder, and that is better than any of those.

Consistent with the unconventional, even playful cast of the institution, however, Brown has named its digitized library catalog ‘Josiah’ after Josiah Carberry, the university’s beloved professor of psychoceramics.

Notwithstanding its title and author, the 1946 pamphlet published in London by The Wine and Food Society called Pottery by A Potter has no more to do with the operation of wheel or kiln than the apocryphal professor. Although it appeared over two decades before Elizabeth David produced her English Potted Meats and Fish Pastes, food writers and culinary enthusiasts more generally have overlooked the Potter’s earlier effort while celebrating hers. Then again, much of the culinary world celebrates anything David regardless of its merit or absence of it.

Obscurity had not been the fate of Pottery at the onset of its existence whether or not anyone actually read it: “In the late ‘forties and early ‘fifties, every new member of the Wine and Food Society received, together with a copy of the current number of the Society’s quarterly magazine and a membership card, a pamphlet entitled Pottery. (David 1)

Pottery represents the more comprehensive survey of the two pamphlets. English Potted Meats includes a scant twelve recipes. David being David, she could not bring herself to confine the contents to the English canon, so one of them is French and another Greek. In contrast Pottery encompasses more than one hundred thirty concise ones for cheese, vegetables and compound butters as well as David’s meat, offal and fish.

David’s recipes are longer and some of them include well welcome historical references. For her instruction “To Pot Ham with Chicken,” for example, she reproduces a 1769 recipe from The Experienced Housekeeper by Elizabeth Raffald. “Readers,” David explains,

“interested in more than the bare formula of a dish will appreciate the charming, simple and well-explained recipe…. Apart from the 18th 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.” (David 10)

Although the passage is typically overwritten, this is an inconsistent David at her best.

The Potter insists in an idiosyncratic, outraged voice that he decided to produce Pottery when he did because

“faddists have run amok in the potting trade, and, hampered by a blight of pettifogging restrictions in the name of Hygiene, a preponderance of the potted goods offered in shops has in many cases deteriorated sadly in flavour and is now-a-days not only tasteless, but of very dubious lineage, so that there is ample room for those who enjoy a savoury spread, on some of the many occasions when it is so palatable, to return to home production, and present day housewives cannot do better than study the methods of the Good Old Days and try out what of them may be best suited to present day usage.” (‘Potter’ 2-3)

Sexist yes, only part of a breathless single sentence (!) and it bears asking where the intrepid revivalist could find adequate ingredients under the boot of the ration book, which in 1946 saddled British people with more stringent hardship than any wartime year, in part stemming from the effort of Whitehall to meliorate the starvation that stalked continental Europe in the aftermath of Nazi depredation during one of the harshest winters ever recorded. No matter, the basic point was good and remains resonant.

Elsewhere as well A Potter, our own pettifogger, displays an appealing pedantry. The compound butter called “Panah” without more is particularly obscure, although Mrs. C. S. Peel describes something similar forty one years earlier under the same name in Savouries Simplified, so the Potter had not made it up.

 The word exists in Hebrew as ‘to turn toward;’ in Hindi, ‘to provide shelter or refuge;’ in Urdu as ‘shield;’ and in Malay, as both noun for ‘arrow’ and verb for ‘shoot,’ originally as in ‘to shoot an arrow.’

Malay would appear the likeliest reference because ‘Potter’ notes that the preparation, made with anchovies, sardines, parsley and cayenne (Mrs. Peel omits the sardine), should be “serve[d] with dry toast (Old Irish recipe).” (Peel 84; ‘Potter’ 25) That makes the ensemble portable and therefore suitable as a component for the hunt lunch, and the Anglo-Irish gentry were avid hunters.

Who else but A Potter has used ‘yclept’ in 1946 or since? He recounts receipt during his days at boarding school of hampers that invariably included “a savoury creature yclept Strasburg [sic] Meat, bred on the same lines as household jam.” (‘Potter’ 2) It is impossible from context to tell but yclept, derived from the Old English, is synonymous with ‘invoke’ or more precisely in this case ‘invoking.’

Except in Australia, where a product something like bologna is called ‘Strasburg Meat,’ mystery enshrouds the term. (Macquarie) It appears the usage was archaic when Potter invoked it in 1946, which would comport with his apparent personality.

At this writing we have found reference to something called ‘Strasburg Meat’ in only a single British source. The One Maid Cookery Book by ‘Mistress A. E. Congreve’ published simultaneously in London and Toronto during 1913 includes a tantalizing reference:

“Savoury sandwiches may be filled with potted Strasberg Meat, Game, Foie Gras, Salmon or Lobster paste.” (Congreve 183) 

Mistress Congreve neither describes the contents of Strasberg Meat nor provides a recipe but does explain that she wrote her Book of Cooking (at Hove so the product may have been sold in England) because

“the number of gentle people living in small houses and flats run with One Maid, or no maid at all is rapidly increasing.” (Congreve “Foreward”)

Newspaper advertisements from the nineteenth and early twentieth century in Canada, Jamaica and the United States offer the stuff for sale as a potted good. An advertisement in the Ottawa Daily Citizen from 29 December 1891, for example, offers “Potted Tongue, Potted Game, Potted Chicken, Potted Turkey, Potted Strasburg Meat,” while the 30 November 1868 Charleston Daily News includes an advertisement that posts “Strasburg Meat” next to “Anchovy and Herring Paste.” (see, e. g., Ottawa Daily Citizen; Charleston [South Carolina] Daily News; Kingston Gleaner)

Perhaps the Potter realized his reference to the memory of Strasberg Meat would tantalize other readers too.

The very inferior American version.

The English have been preserving all manner of food in a binding medium of fat capped with butter for centuries. Milk solids spoil faster so knowledgeable potmakers always clarify their butter by melting and straining it. The simple step extends the larder life of the pot for a long time at room temperature, a lot longer kept cold.

in her indispensable Food in England the inimitable Dorothy Hartley notes that potted foods are an element of the British maritime heritage:

“As to the medieval custom of killing stock before winter we owe our knowledge of salting and curing, so to the early sailing ships we owe our knowledge of potted and dried meats.” (Hartley 345)

She also identifies another level of preservation known to eighteenth century potters. Potted foods then were made at scale; an early recipe for potted meat intended as a ships’ store specifies sixteen pounds of beef. That size pot was big enough to support “boughs of aromatic herbs laid across the old potted meats to keep away the flies and help preserve the contents under the airtight surface.” (Hartley 346)

Other writers including Elisabeth Ayrton would disagree but a close reading of the recipes reveals that the distinctive technique diverges from the French process of producing pâté. David for one considers potted food “one of our most characteristic national delicacies…. Then, the neat little white pots, the crust of yellow butter, there is something fundamentally English in the picture evoked by” the potter. (David 2) To keep the picture clear, David insists 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.” (David 5)

A small Kilner or mason jar is an excellent alternative to an actual pot.

The English medium as well as cap traditionally is the clarified butter, a fat seldom used in French charcuterie. And on occasion an English recipe calls for suet instead, an ingredient so unknown to the Gallic kitchen that it bears no French name. English recipes nearly never incorporate pork fat (although lookout below), the default binding for any French pâté or terrine. (Boyd 333, 333-39)

The spices or occasional herbs that season the substance for potting are with few exceptions cooked with it or added dry, never fresh, like the clarified butter the better to promote preservation, and the grind of the cooked foodstuff for the pot invariably fine except, sometimes, for shrimp, and for the same reason. The French do produce pillowy mousse but the predominant English technique--pounded fine in a mortar with a pestle instead of cut or ground--distinguishes it from the other French tradition of coarsely cut terrines.

Potting

“involved packing meat so tightly into a pot that air was completely excluded and for that reason the meat had to be pounded to an extremely firm texture.” (Boyd 333)

Traditional British potted foods bore no resemblance to the dire canned products based on mechanically separated meat--essentially bone, fat, sinew and other industrial waste ripped robotically from a carcass--sold today in the United States. “The best parts of the meat,” in contrast, “were cooked in the pots” by the British. (Hartley 346; see Boyd 333)

Without attribution, David echoes Hartley in her insistence that potted foods “demand first class basic ingredients and a liberal hand with butter.” In her typical tone she decries the debased pots that emerged from the hardships of wartime and postwar shortage:

“In those days of rationing and imitation food we associated fish paste and potted meat with the fearful compounds of soya bean flour, dried egg and dehydrated onions bashed up with snoek [see the Notes] or Spam which were cheerfully known as ‘mock crab paste’ and ‘meat spread.’ By 1954, when fourteen years of rationing came to an end none of us wanted to hear another word of the makeshift cooking which potted foods and fish pastes seemed to imply.” (David 1)

With English Potted Meats David’s mission was, no less than the Potter’s, to revive the reputation of traditional potting.

Potted foods were built to last, “not only to preserve meat through the winter at home but also” for the long sea voyages that bound the empire and secured its trade. (Ayrton 6) Preservation however was not the only advantage potted foods brought to the ship’s store; “it was essentially a condensing process used to compress extra food value for seamen and travelers.”

Potted products contribute to the evidence contradicting the conventional wisdom that food at sea always was frightful. As Hartley notes (contra our Potter) of the mid twentieth century,

“it is significant that the luxury potted meats, the luxury potted salmon, potted hare and so forth, are still found around the old sea-port towns and posting inns.” (Hartley 346)

One of the oldest, and maritime, methods is one of the outliers bound with suet. “An old potting recipe suitable for ships’ provisions,” Lizzie Boyd explains in her encyclopedic compilation of British Cookery,

“was the so-called beef cheese, cooked in an earthenware pot lined with bacon and filled with a mixture of lean, minced beef, bacon and beef suet, flavoured with salt, pepper, cloves and thyme and moistened with brandy.” (Boyd 333)

Hartley elaborates on the preparation and provides an excellent narrative recipe with the comment that beef cheese “probably went to America on the Mayflower.” (Hartley 346)

English potted foods differ from their French analogues in another respect that may surprise Americans: They are lavishly seasoned, especially ones based on fish. “Generous use of spices,” Boyd also notes, “is one of the characteristics of potted fish.” (Boyd 233)

The pedantry of A Potter provides for a comprehensive and nuanced catalogue of preparations. Many of the recipes, he concedes,

“look, on first glance, horribly alike, but each embodies, in fact, some trifling variation of construction or composition, which may appeal to the individual taste, or inclination, of budding cordons bleus, or suggest ideas for novel possibilities in combination with other recipes, and worthy of perpetuation.”

The Potter may be a pedant but he is neither poser nor plagiarist. Pottery, he admits, “contains nothing either new or original, just a selection of recipes, ancient and modern, culled from the pages of a fairly extensive culinary library.” (‘Potter’ 3)

The disparate sources explain the inconsistent format and varying detail of the recipes in Pottery. Some of them omit mention of the critical component, clarified butter, likely not from negligence but rather a confidence that contemporary readers had been familiar with the potting process.

“Shake over a clear fire,” an instruction from the recipe for making mushroom powder, indicates that the recipe is an old one. (‘Potter’ 14-15) A clear fire refers to a nonsmoking fire in an open hearth; eighteenth century recipes frequently refer to roasting meat “before,” or in front of, an open fire on a turning spit.

Sometimes ‘Potter’ attributes authorship to his instructions, mostly for compound butters; perhaps he was less confident of his own capabilities in that category of recipe. Sometimes he assumes his reader has some knowledge of culinary history. Hannah Glasse gets only the cryptic citation, “H. G. 1747;” the popular Victorian cookbook written by the queen’s sometime chef is cited only by his name, “Francatelli.” A number of the flavored butters are attributed simply to the prolific “Ambrose Heath.” For two prominent authors of multiple books however the potter does distinguish the particular publication; “Soyer 1857;” “Ude 1913.”

While the potter refuses to condescend to his readers he does make an effort not to confuse them, by citing three of his more obscure sources in full. They are de Croze, Les Plats Regionaux de France ([Paris] 1926); Filippini, The International Cook Book ([London] 1906); Pellapret, La Cuisine de tous les jours (Paris 1916); and Siepen, Continental Cookery for the English Table (London 1915).

Notwithstanding its lightness of being and unlike some of David’s work, English Potted Meats is more than bearable.

With the little pamphlet David also performed a significant service in another respect. It is a tribute not only to the peculiarly English potted preservation medium but, it turns out, also to Pottery.

David, who could be churlish, critical and cruel, admired A Potter himself and wrote English Potted Meats because she likes his style; “the Potters work,” she thinks, “makes enticing reading,” and so it does. David went to the trouble of undertaking research to determine his identity, and found it through the grace of André Simon.

The Potter in fact is Major Matthew Connolly, an indication that a love of literature may be the gift from parent to child, for the major was the father of Cyril Connolly, the famed if flawed underachiever admired by the Fitzrovia set for his work as editor of Horizon, who somewhat infamously blamed his own dearth of original output on “the pram in the hall,” ignoring the fact that parents have produced as much work of literary output as anyone else. (David 2)

It would be tantamount to teasing not to describe a few noteworthy pots, pastes and butters from Pottery other than the Panah. Eleven og them appear together in the practical.

Notes:

-Anyone new to potting, and to clarifying butter, can skip a step without impairing in any way the authenticity of the pot. Jars of clarified butter now are widely available in the guise of ghee. Traditional British foodways unlike Indian ones get scant respect on the supermarket shelf.

-Snoek is a fish from South African waters and canned snoek was a particularly revolting wartime expedient the British Ministry of Food attempted without success to convince the public was palatable.

-The potter’s reference to Alexis Soyer is for The Culinary Campaign, which arose from his work with Florence Nightingale to improve soldiers’ rations during the Crimean War; the reference to Eustache Ude for the self-explanatory French Cook. The Heath book in question breaks from his usually concise titles: Savoury Snacks--A Collection of Recipes for Snacks, Hot and Cold, Suitable for Sherry or Cocktail Parties, Picnics, Informal Meals, Late Suppers and Other Notable Occasions When Light But Not Uninteresting Fare Is Expected: With a Note on Savoury Butters.

Sources:

Advertisement, the Charleston [South Carolina] Daily News (30 November 1868)

Advertisement, the Kingston Gleaner (10 January 1885)

Advertisement, the Ottawa Daily Citizen (29 December 1891)

Anon., Macquarie Dictionary, http://www.macquariedictionary.com.au (n. d.) (accessed 26 May 2020)

Elisabeth Ayrton, The Cookery of England (London 1974)

Lizzie Boyd (ed.), British Cookery: A complete guide to culinary practice in the British Isles (Woodstock NY 1979)

A. E. Congreve, The One Maid Book of Cookery (London and Toronto 1913)

Elizabeth David, English Potted Meats and Fish Pastes (London 1968)

Dorothy Hartley, Food in England (London 1954)

A. S. Peel, Savouries Simplified (London 1905)
‘A Potter,’ Pottery: Home made Potted Foods Meat and Fish Pastes Savoury Butters and others (London 1946)