Home › The Principles of Cookery › Forcemeat of Shrimp
Forcemeat of Shrimp
Clear a pint of shrimps from their shells, and chop them finely. Mix with an equal quantity of bread-crumbs. Season with salt, pepper, and a small quantity of mace. Pound into a smooth paste, with two or three ounces of butter. Bind with the yolk of an egg. Use this forcemeat to stuff any fresh-water fish. A pike, for example, if stuffed and baked, will be found excellent.
A short, dense stuffing paste of the kind Victorian kitchens kept in the repertoire for baked fish. Two things decide whether it works: the shrimp must be small and sweet, and the crumbs must be soft, not dry.
- A pint of shrimpsA volume measure, though the wording ("clear a pint of shrimps from their shells") leaves it unclear whether the pint is measured before or after shelling; the older reading is usually shell-on. A pint of small peeled shrimp runs roughly 8-10 oz (225-280 g), so about 1 lb shell-on gets you there. The measure by the pint points to the small brown shrimp of British fishmongers rather than large prawns.
- Bread-crumbs, equal quantityEqual by volume, so about a pint of crumbs. Use fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf with the crusts off; dried packaged crumbs will drink the butter and turn the forcemeat to sand.
- MaceThe lacy outer coat of the nutmeg, warmer and less sharp than the seed. Ground mace is still sold; about 1/4 teaspoon is a "small quantity" for this batch. Nutmeg at half the amount is the nearest substitute.
- Pound into a smooth pasteA food processor does in twenty seconds what the mortar did in ten minutes. Pulse rather than run it, and stop while a little shrimp texture remains, or the mixture packs into a rubbery block once heated.
- The butter mattersTwo or three ounces (55-85 g) into this quantity looks generous and is not. It is what keeps the crumbs from setting hard inside the fish. Soften it first; cold butter will not amalgamate under a processor blade without over-working the shrimp.
- The egg yolkOne yolk binds this amount. It goes in raw and should be cooked through in the baking, but check the stuffing itself rather than assuming it, since a packed cavity heats more slowly than the fish. If the paste is too stiff to shape, loosen with a spoonful of cream rather than a second yolk.
- Baking the fishNo oven heat is given. A whole stuffed freshwater fish bakes well at 375F (190C), allowing roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point and testing at the backbone. Do not pack the cavity tight; the forcemeat swells slightly.
- Pike, in practicePike is bony and lean, which is exactly why the period liked it stuffed and buttered. Any firm freshwater fish takes this well - trout, perch, or a small carp - and it is equally at home in sole fillets rolled and poached. This quantity stuffs a fish of about 3-4 lb, serving four to six.
Forcemeat - from the French farce, a stuffing, and nothing to do with force - was one of the organising ideas of nineteenth-century English cookery, and the cookery books of the period list dozens of them: veal, oyster, chestnut, liver, each matched to a particular joint or bird. The shrimp version belongs to a long British habit of pairing the sea with fresh water on the plate, and pike in particular was a fish that needed help: lean, muddy-flavoured at times, and notoriously full of small Y-shaped bones. A rich buttered stuffing moistened it from the inside while it baked. The small brown shrimp assumed here were a cheap, everyday commodity in Victorian Britain, sold cooked and measured by the pint from Morecambe Bay and the Thames estuary, and they turn up throughout the period in potted form, in sauces, and folded into paste like this one.