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PRAWN SOUP (another way)
Prepare two quarts of stock according to the directions given in the last recipe. Pick the tails from a hundred freshly-boiled prawns, and put the shells and bodies into a stewpan with a quarter of a pint of vinegar, a quarter of a pint of stock, and a blade of mace. Let them simmer for twenty minutes. Press the prawns through a sieve, and with them the crumb of a French roll which has been softened with a little of the stock. Mix the liquid with the soup, and add a little lemon-juice and Harvey's sauce, with a tea-spoonful of anchovy, and a pinch of cayenne; boil for five minutes; add the shelled prawns, and, when they are quite hot, serve the soup in a tureen. Time, altogether, about an hour and a half. Probable cost, uncertain. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
A Victorian shellfish bisque built on the shells rather than the meat, thickened with bread rather than flour. Most of the work is extraction, and the tails go in only at the very end.
- The hinge: the tailsThe prawns are already boiled. They go into the finished soup only to warm through — a minute or two. Anything longer and they turn to rubber, which is the usual failure of this style of soup.
- A hundred prawnsThat is a Victorian household quantity, and it points to prawns considerably smaller than the large tiger prawns sold today. Work by weight instead: about 2 lb of shell-on cooked prawns will give you roughly 1 lb of picked tails plus the shells and heads you need for the extraction.
- Quarter of a pintImperial measure, so 5 fl oz — a scant 2/3 US cup — of vinegar and the same of stock. That is a sharp amount of vinegar for 2 quarts of soup; add the strained shell liquid gradually and taste before committing all of it.
- The stockThe "last recipe" is not given here; in context it is presumably a fish stock. Use 2 quarts of a light fish or shellfish stock; a chicken stock cut with the shell liquor also works, but avoid anything heavily seasoned, since Harvey's sauce and anchovy bring plenty of salt.
- Harvey's sauce and anchovyHarvey's was a commercial bottled sauce of anchovy, soy, vinegar and spice, no longer made. Worcestershire is the closest surviving equivalent; a tablespoon or so is enough. "A tea-spoonful of anchovy" most likely means anchovy essence — anchovy paste, or one mashed salted fillet, will stand in.
- Crumb of a French rollThe soft interior of a white roll, about a cup loosely packed, soaked in stock. It is the only thickener in the soup. Modern equivalent: soft fresh breadcrumbs, blitzed with the sieved prawn solids so the soup comes out smooth rather than grainy.
- Pressing through a sieveA blender or food processor does the pulverising, but you still need to strain afterwards through a fine sieve or a chinois — shell fragments are sharp and will not soften. Press hard on the solids to get the flavour out, then discard them.
- MaceA blade of mace is the lacy outer covering of nutmeg, sold whole in strips. A pinch of ground mace substitutes, but add it with the shells so it has time to bloom rather than at the end.
- YieldEight or nine bowls as written, which holds up: 2 quarts of finished soup. It is rich enough to serve in small cups as a first course, in which case it will stretch further.
Prawn and shrimp soups of this kind belong to the English tradition of shellfish "bisks" — the shells pounded and steeped to extract colour and flavour, the meat added whole at the end. What helps date this version is the bottle rack behind it: Harvey's sauce, anchovy essence and cayenne were the standard Victorian trio for lifting fish cookery, and Cassell's reaches for them almost reflexively. Harvey's, a spiced anchovy-and-soy sauce generally said to have been sold commercially from around the late eighteenth century, was as ordinary a store-cupboard item in 1880 as Worcestershire is now, and it has since largely disappeared. The bread-crumb thickening is older still, a survival of the medieval and early modern habit of binding sauces with soaked bread rather than roux — cheaper than butter and flour, and it leaves the shellfish flavour undamped. The frank admission that the cost is "uncertain" tells you something too: prawns came from whoever had landed them that morning, at whatever the day's price happened to be.