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Crayfish, to Dress
Wash the crayfish and boil them for ten minutes in water with salt in it. They should be a bright red when done. Drain them. Pile them on a napkin, pyramid form, and garnish the dish with parsley. Probable cost, 2s. per quart. Sufficient, a quart for a dish.
A late-Victorian instruction for plain boiled crayfish, served cold as a help-yourself dish. The whole thing turns on the size of the crayfish and on not overcooking them.
- Ten minutes is too long for small crayfishThe native European crayfish of Cassell's day were mostly finger-length, and a hard boil of ten minutes leaves the tail meat cottony. Modern signal crayfish or imported red swamp crayfish of that size need 3-5 minutes from the return to the boil; large specimens 6-8. The colour cue in the original is sound: pull them when the shells are uniformly bright red.
- A quart is a measure of volume, not weightShellfish were sold by the quart in Victorian markets, which is why the price is quoted that way. A quart of whole crayfish comes to something in the region of a pound (roughly 500 g), depending on their size and how they pack; that is a course for one or two, or a nibble with bread and butter for more. "2s. per quart" is simply the going price, not an instruction.
- Salt the water properly"Water with salt in it" means salting generously: about 1/4 cup of salt per gallon, or roughly 60 g per 4 litres, which is well short of seawater strength. Under-salted water gives flat, watery meat.
- Buy them live and purge themCrayfish spoil very quickly once dead, which is why the original assumes a live purchase. Keep them cold and lively until cooking, hold them in clean water for an hour or two to clear grit and mud, and discard any that are already dead. Freshwater crayfish are more prone to muddy off-flavours than sea shellfish.
- Cook in batchesAdding a whole quart at once drops the water off the boil and staggers the cooking. Work in batches large enough that the water returns to a rolling boil within a minute.
- The napkin pyramidDraining well matters if the dish is to be built up dry on a folded cloth. The recipe does not say whether they go to table hot or cold, though the napkin-and-parsley presentation points to cold. Arrange tails outward and serve with brown bread, butter, lemon and a finger bowl. Nothing in the recipe requires peeling in the kitchen; the eater does the work.
- Sourcing and legalityIn Britain the native white-clawed crayfish is a protected species and must not be taken. Signal crayfish are invasive and trapping them is controlled by licence, so buy from a fishmonger rather than a stream. Elsewhere, farmed or wild-caught crayfish are widely sold live in season.
Crayfish were a routine market item in nineteenth-century Britain, taken from chalk streams and rivers and sold by the quart alongside shrimps and winkles, which is why Cassell's treats them as an everyday garnish-and-pile dish rather than a delicacy. The white-clawed crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes) was the species in question, and its collapse is usually traced to crayfish plague, which arrived with the American signal crayfish introduced for farming in the later twentieth century and was first recorded in British waters in the 1980s; so a dish that once cost two shillings a quart at the fish stall is now built largely on imported or invasive stock. The serving style, a pyramid on a folded napkin with parsley, belongs to the same tradition of cold buffet arrangement that governed prawns, shrimps and lobster claws on Victorian supper tables: the cook boiled and stacked, and the diner shelled at the table.