Potted Meats and Preserved Fish
Photos by Michael Piazza / Styled by Catrine Kelty
It’s easy to forget that until recently English food was an international punchline. What was English food? Jiggly puddings and jellies and bland subsistence fare, grim grey meats. Underseasoned, overcooked, lacking French skill and Italian soul. Thanks for the fish and chips, no thanks for the fruitcake. And what on earth is spotted dick?
Today London is broadly accepted as one of the world’s best food cities, but it’s not exactly English food it’s known for. The city is more an international food hub than a culinary influencer, and its reputation across the pond rests on the cuisines of its immigrants, neighbors and former colonies— Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray with their refined Italian at River Café, Yotam Ottolenghi with his sumptuous Eastern Mediterranean, the general reputation for the best Indian food outside of India.
Elizabeth David, the eminent 20th-century British “cookery” writer, is known for bringing Mediterranean sunshine to the dreary postwar English table. Her books on Italian, French and Mediterranean cooking are routinely repackaged in stylish new paperback editions, but her two terrific books on English cooking are both out of print. David’s protegé, Jane Grigson, also began her career writing about continental cuisine, but her greatest legacy lies in the practical seriousness and curiosity she brought to the native foods of England. Grigson’s columns and cookbooks told the culinary story of England through dishes like cock-a-leekie and gooseberry fool. An early champion of animal welfare and food provenance, Grigson set the stage for English food to have its moment in the aughts.
It’s been a quarter century now since a new generation of puckish male chefs in quirky spectacles carried English cooking forward, an earthy, distinctly British cuisine that was meat-heavy and earnest but more thoughtful than macho. St. John, Fergus Henderson’s first nose-to-tail restaurant, is largely responsible for the bone marrow appetizer we still find on menus everywhere. At River Cottage, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall brought the British masses back to the land when his farm-based restaurant became a popular television series. The new chefs cooked from British soil, waters and tradition. The restaurants were elegant, but the cookbooks approached local ingredients with ethics and economy.
So, potted meats. Despite our wholesale embrace of the farm-to-table ethos, despite the reverse snobbery that whisked white cloths from restaurant tables, despite our love of muddy-booted farmers, genius nonnas and unfussed- over peasant fare, potted meat can be a hard sell. “Potted meats” evokes a dated, colorless vision of English fare, one of putting up and getting by. The canned, mechanically separated and partially defatted processed meat products made in the States by American food corporations and sold for less than a dollar bear no relation to the traditional foods of the 18th-century British Isles, and they’re probably responsible for our general revulsion at the term. We’re just beginning to dispel the centuries-old myth of French culinary superiority; potted meats and rillettes are essentially one and the same: rustic shredded meat cooked in its own fat and sealed under more fat to preserve it for winter. Who’d turn up her nose at rillettes?
It makes sense that the cuisine of old England would influence us here in the new one: We share a language, history and approximate latitude. Our colonial cuisine, like so many around the world, closely resembled what they ate in the motherland, incorporating New World ingredients into East Anglian dishes, salting mackerel and potting venison by the gallon.
Crude and peasantish but also festive and luxurious, now seems a fitting moment for preserved fish and potted meats. We’re entering 2021 with a bit of cautious optimism and a lot of uncertainty. These recipes are designed to preserve our own land and sea, with invasive green crab and abundant local mackerel standing in for king crab and salmon. Cheaper cuts of lamb and pork are cooked slowly and carefully, the ample fat put to work preserving the meat for later. The meats can be kept in the fridge for a few months under a good layer of fat, the mackerel at least a couple of weeks. Each one is just a bit of a project, well suited to long days at home, and makes a lovely and surprising gift dropped on a neighbor’s doorstep in lieu of another bag of takeaway. Make sure to set a few aside for your own enjoyment, something savory and honest for whatever tomorrow brings.
This story appeared in the Winter 2021 issue.
