Chicken Paste

A pot of chicken paste opens on the smell of boiled chicken with a trace of white pepper, the smell of a stockpot. The paste underneath is pale beige and faintly glossy, packed flat to the glass, and it takes the back of a knife like cold butter. That colour puts it at the mild end of the paste shelf, paler than the beef jar beside it, and the sandwich follows suit: two slices of soft white bread, butter spread to the edges, and a scrape of paste thin enough that the butter shows through at the corners. Cut into triangles or fingers, crusts off for children, it is three soft layers with a very small amount of filling in the middle.

The butter has the first job. Cold from the fridge it tears the crumb, so it goes on soft, laid across the slice as a seal that lets the paste travel in one pass and keeps the bread white at the edges. After that the margin for error is narrow. Too much paste clogs into a salty cream that glues itself to the palate; too little and the sandwich tastes of buttered bread with a faint memory of poultry. A good one gives under the teeth at once, the crumb and the paste yielding together, and the paste goes smooth and cool against the tongue: savoury, lightly salted, a flat peppery warmth, and a film of fat left on the lips. Nothing in it needs chewing.

Chicken paste belongs to the tea plate. It sits cut into triangles beside the egg and cress, offered to children and to visiting aunts alike. Its mildness makes it an easy first paste for a child, and a sandwich that holds together in a school bag without a leaf or a slice of tomato to wilt. Cucumber or a few sprigs of cress go in when someone wants a crunch, and many people add nothing at all. The sandwich is a cupboard sandwich, made in two minutes from a pot that was bought weeks earlier.

In a lunch tin the sandwich meets its hardest test. Wrapped in greaseproof paper and carried in a satchel through a morning, a paste sandwich has no loose slice to slide out or dry at the edges, and the filling has no juice to wet the bread. Unwrapped at noon it smells faintly of butter and cooked chicken, the bread has gone slightly cool and tacky at the crust, and the paste has softened just enough to squeeze a little at the seam when pressed. Eaten in the playground or at a desk, a quarter at a time, it is quiet food, a plain savoury taste that makes no demands and gets finished without anyone noticing.

The pot is the unit of the whole arrangement. A small sterilised glass jar with an airtight lid keeps unopened on a shelf for months, which is why it was bought several at a time against a week of packed lunches and why it survived being forgotten behind the tinned tomatoes. Once opened, the surface dries and darkens at the rim, and the last of it has to be coaxed out of the corners with the tip of a knife. One pot fills a plate of triangles for a tea, and the knife scrapes the glass with a small dry squeak when it nears the bottom, the signal that the next pot is wanted.

Origin and history

Chicken went into the pot after the pot existed. Shippam's, a Chichester grocery business at Westgate from 1786, began selling potted meats and fish pastes in 1894, and moved them into sterilised glass jars with airtight metal caps in 1906. No record names who first put chicken into one.

Poultry became a business of its own for the firm in 1969, when Shippam's bought the Crediton Poultry Processing Plant in Devon, a year after taking over Senior's of Middlesex, another maker of potted meat and fish pastes. Princes Ltd bought Shippam's in 2001, and the Shippam's name continues on the shelf under Princes.

The plainest statement of what the pot promised is a Shippam's advertisement from 1955. It opens on a roast chicken on a serving plate; graphics redraw the bird as a paste pot, the camera settles on the label, and the tagline says only real chickens can apply to be Shippam's chickens. In a companion Shippam's film of 1955, titled for chicken and meat paste, a small girl picks a pot in a shop, then serves sandwiches from it at home to a friend, a teddy bear and the grown-ups in the sitting room.