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Crayfish, to Stew
Take a quart of crayfish, remove the gut from the centre fin of the tail, and pick the meat from the tails. Pound the bodies, with four ounces of butter, and put them into a stewpan with four pints of water, a spoonful of vinegar, half a nutmeg grated, and a little salt and pepper. Simmer gently for half an hour. Strain, and thicken the sauce with a little flour. Add the tails. When they are hot, pour the whole over a slice of toasted bread, and serve. Probable cost of crayfish, 2s. per quart. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A Victorian crayfish stew that is really a shellfish bisque poured over toast: the bodies and shells make the sauce, the tail meat is the garnish. Two things need attention before anything else — the crayfish must be cooked before you can pick them, and the shell debris must be strained out properly.
- Cook them firstThe recipe says nothing about cooking the crayfish before picking them, and picking raw tails is unpleasant work. Drop live crayfish into heavily salted boiling water for 3-4 minutes until the shells turn red, then cool and pick. Reserve every scrap of head, shell and claw for the sauce.
- "Remove the gut"The dark intestinal vein runs the length of the tail and is pulled out by twisting the centre tail fin and drawing it away. Do this before or after cooking; skipping it gives a muddy, bitter note.
- A quart of crayfishA volume measure, not a weight — very roughly 1 to 1½ lb / 500-700 g of whole live crayfish, which yields only a few ounces of picked tail meat. That is why the shells carry the dish.
- Pounding the bodies with butterThis is crayfish butter in all but name. A mortar works; a food processor pulsed with the 4 oz of butter is faster. The butter carries the fat-soluble colour and flavour out of the shells, so do not substitute water here.
- Strain twicePounded shell leaves fine grit and needle-sharp fragments. Pass the liquid through a conical sieve, then again through a sieve lined with muslin, pressing hard to extract the butter.
- Four pints is a lotTwo litres of water reduced for only half an hour gives a thin, weak broth. Reduce the strained liquid hard, to about a pint, before thickening — or start with less water.
- Thickening"A little flour" means a beurre manié or a slack roux: about 1 oz flour worked into 1 oz butter, whisked in and simmered two or three minutes to lose the raw taste. Adding dry flour to hot liquid will lump.
- The tails go in lastThey are already cooked. Thirty seconds in the hot sauce is enough; any longer and they turn to rubber. Take the pan off the heat before they go in.
- NutmegHalf a whole nutmeg grated into this quantity is assertive by modern taste. A quarter, or less, sits better with shellfish.
- Yield"Six or seven persons" reflects a Victorian dinner of many courses. With this much tail meat it serves two or three as a supper dish, four as a small first course.
- SourcingThe white-clawed crayfish native to Britain is now protected and cannot be taken; commercial supply is signal crayfish or imported freshwater crayfish, and in the United States, crawfish. Check local rules before trapping anything yourself.
Freshwater crayfish were a staple of European cookery long before they became a delicacy sold by the quart. The method here is the classic bisque technique: pound the shells with butter, draw out colour and flavour into a liquid, strain, thicken, and return the picked meat at the last moment. Pouring the whole over a slice of toast is often said to be the older English habit, and the fashion for serving such things in a soup plate with cream may well be the later of the two. The dish reads as a period piece now largely because the crayfish themselves vanished: crayfish plague, introduced to Europe in the nineteenth century and spread further by imported North American species, devastated native populations, and the white-clawed crayfish that Victorian cooks bought by the quart is today a protected animal in Britain.