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Prawn Pie
Have as many well-cleaned prawns as will nearly fill the pie-dish. Season with pounded mace, cloves, a little cayenne or chilli vinegar. Put some butter in the dish, and cover with a light puff-paste. The pie will take less than three-quarters of an hour to bake.
A terse Victorian shellfish pie: a dish of prawns, warm spice, butter and a puff-paste lid. Almost every quantity is left to the cook, so the useful work is in fixing the ones that matter.
- The prawns should already be cookedThe prawns were probably already cooked -- prawns were commonly sold ready-boiled by British fishmongers at the time, and the recipe gives no cooking instruction, only "well-cleaned". Buy cooked, peeled prawns, or boil raw ones briefly and shell them before they go in the dish.
- Cut the baking timeWatch the baking time -- the recipe sets an upper limit of under three-quarters of an hour, but that is still long enough to make cooked prawns rubbery. Bake only long enough to set and brown the puff paste, roughly 20 to 25 minutes, and treat the pastry rather than the clock as the signal.
- Oven heatThe recipe specifies none. Puff paste needs a brisk oven: 425F to give the layers their initial lift, dropping to 375F if the top colours too fast.
- Butter and moistureFor "some butter", reckon on about 2 oz for a pint-and-a-half dish, dotted over the prawns. The recipe adds no liquid at all, which risks a dry filling; 3 to 4 tablespoons of cream, fish stock or the prawn cooking water will let the pastry lid trap some steam.
- Pounded mace and clovesMace is the lacy covering of nutmeg, warmer and less sweet than the seed itself; a quarter teaspoon of ground mace and a pinch of ground cloves is plenty for a pint of prawns. Cloves overwhelm shellfish very quickly.
- Chilli vinegarA Victorian storecupboard condiment: vinegar steeped with dried red chillies. A teaspoon of any chilli-infused vinegar, or cider vinegar with a scrape of cayenne, gives the same sharp heat. It is an alternative to the cayenne, not an addition.
- Dish and yieldA 1.5-pint pie dish holding about 1 lb of shelled prawns serves four as a light main course. Use a dish with a rim so the paste has something to seal against, and cut a vent in the lid.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery gathered thousands of these compressed entries for late-nineteenth-century British households, and its shellfish pies belong to a much older English line of spiced, buttered fish dishes thos same pairing of mace, cloves and cayenne with butter that produced potted shrimps and potted lobster. Mace is often said to have been among the usual English spices for shellfish from the seventeenth century onward, and butter served the double purpose of seasoning and preservation in an era before reliable refrigeration. The prawns intended here were most likely the small species landed around the British coast, generally sold already boiled by fishmongers, which may be why the recipe assumes cleaning but never mentions cooking them. Chilli vinegar, sold bottled and also made at home, was one of a family of flavoured vinegars tarragon, garlic, horseradish that Victorian kitchens kept on hand where a modern cook would reach for a bottled sauce.