The 18th-century cookery writer Hannah Glasse recommended that “to save Potted Birds, that begin to be bad” required dunking the birds in boiling water for 30 seconds, then retopping with new butter.
To make her potted beef taste like venison, she added salprunella (melted nitre – saltpetre – reacted with charcoal dust). Even some of her contempotaries were horrified; William Ellis, author of The Country Housewife’s Companion of 1750 complained this treatment made food “unpleasantly dry”. Today we know it was also carcinogenic.
Sometimes you wonder how our ancestors survived….
(From Emily Cockayne, Hubbub, Filth, Noise and Stench in England 1660-1770 p. 101-2. Which had been really looking forward to, but which I found disappointing – something about the catalogue nature — chapters are headed “ugly”, “itchy” “mouldy” etc, and I felt a bit like I was reading a trainspotter text.)
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