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Crab, Mock
Take a pound of Gloucester or Cheshire cheese, and pound it in a mortar with two spoonfuls of vinegar, three of salad-oil, one of mixed mustard, and salt and cayenne to taste. When it is well pounded, mix with it half a pound of potted shrimps. It may be served in a crab-shell, and garnished with parsley. Time, about twenty minutes to prepare. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A no-cook savoury spread that mimics dressed crab in colour and texture. The hinge is the pounding: the cheese must be worked to a smooth paste before anything wet goes in, or the oil and vinegar will simply slide off it.
- The cheesesGloucester and Cheshire are both firm, crumbly and mildly tangy — Cheshire is the drier and saltier of the two. The coloured (annatto-dyed) versions of either give a pale orange cast that helps the imitation along; a rubbery block cheddar is more likely to pound into a greasy mass.
- Mortar workA food processor does this in under a minute. Grate or crumble the cheese first, pulse it to a paste, then trickle in the oil and vinegar as you would for mayonnaise so the mixture emulsifies rather than splits.
- SpoonfulsAn unqualified "spoonful" in books of this kind is usually taken as a tablespoon: roughly 2 tbsp vinegar, 3 tbsp oil, 1 tbsp mustard. Add the vinegar cautiously — a pound of Cheshire is already salty and sharp, and you can always finish with more.
- Salad-oilIn nineteenth-century British cookery this usually meant olive oil, though other bland oils were sold under the name. A light olive oil or a neutral oil keeps the cheese and shrimp forward.
- Mixed mustardMustard powder already slaked with water, i.e. made mustard. English mustard is the period-appropriate choice; Dijon works but shifts the flavour.
- Potted shrimpsSmall brown shrimps packed under clarified spiced butter, still sold chilled in tubs. Let them come to room temperature so the butter softens, then fold them in whole at the end — pounding them destroys the one thing that reads as crab meat in the mouth.
- ServingServes four or five as a savoury or a first course. Scrub and boil any crab shells you use, or serve it in ramekins with hot toast, brown bread and butter, or thin dry biscuits. Chill an hour to firm it, but bring it back toward room temperature before eating or the butter tastes waxy.
- Probable cost1s 8d is twenty pence in pre-decimal money.
"Mock" dishes run right through nineteenth-century English cookery — mock turtle, mock goose, mock cream — and they are usually about substituting something cheap and keepable for something expensive or perishable. Fresh crab travelled badly, so a cook inland who wanted a crab-shell on the supper table built one out of the larder: hard cheese, oil, vinegar, mustard and potted shrimps. The result belongs to the British savoury course, the small sharp dish served after the sweet at dinner, and it is close kin to the potted-cheese and Welsh-rabbit mixtures of the same period. The trick is entirely one of texture and colour rather than flavour, and the choice of Gloucester or Cheshire is not incidental — both crumble to a flaked paste that a diner's eye reads as picked crab meat.