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Prawns, Buttered
Pick a pint of freshly-boiled prawns. Bruise the shells, and put them into a stewpan with a breakfast-cupful of stock, and a little cayenne and grated nutmeg. Let them simmer for twenty minutes; strain the liquid, and thicken it with flour and butter to the consistency of thick cream. Put in the picked prawns, and heat them thoroughly. Serve on a hot dish, and garnish with toasted sippets. Time, three minutes to heat the prawns. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A shellfish-stock sauce built on the shells rather than on cream, and quick once the stock is made. The picked prawns go in only at the very end.
- A pint of prawnsThe pint is a volume measure of prawns in the shell, roughly 12-14 oz whole, giving perhaps 6-8 oz of picked meat. Cooked, peeled prawns of about that weight will serve, though you then lose the shells that flavour the sauce; buy shell-on if you can.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup: reckon 8-10 fl oz. Fish or light chicken stock both work; a vegetable stock keeps the prawn flavour cleanest.
- Bruise the shellsCrush them with the end of a rolling pin or a heavy pan base before they go into the liquid. Broken shells release far more flavour, and the twenty-minute simmer is the whole point of the dish.
- Strain properlyPass the stock through a fine sieve, and through muslin if you have it. Shell fragments in a thickened sauce are unpleasant and hard to remove later.
- Thicken it with flour and butterMost simply done by kneading equal weights of soft butter and flour into a paste and whisking it into the simmering stock in small pieces, though the phrase could equally cover a cooked roux. Around 1/2 oz of each per cup of stock should bring it to thick-cream consistency; simmer two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour.
- Three minutes, and no moreThree minutes -- the original allows three minutes to heat the prawns. Already-boiled prawns need only to warm through in the sauce over low heat; a further boil turns them tough and squeaky.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toast or fried bread, tucked round the edge of the dish. Cut and toast them while the stock simmers so they are still crisp at the table.
- Seasoning"A little cayenne" is a pinch, and the nutmeg should be barely detectable. Salt at the end, after the stock has simmered down and its own salt has concentrated.
- ServingThree or four as a savoury or light first course, more if spooned over rice or into pastry cases.
"Buttered" in Victorian and Edwardian cookery books usually signals a dish bound with butter rather than one merely dressed with it, and the phrase is much older: buttered eggs, buttered lobster and buttered crab all appear in English cookery well before this recipe. What distinguishes this version is its thrift with the shells, an approach shared with potted and bisque-style shellfish dishes of the same period, where the flavour of an expensive ingredient is stretched by extracting everything the trimmings will give. Prawns were a common British coastal catch sold boiled by the pint measure rather than by weight, which is why the recipe opens with a volume; the same convention survives in the way shrimps and cockles were sold from stalls into the twentieth century. The dish belongs to the family of small hot savouries served on toast, a course that at a late-Victorian dinner came after the sweet, immediately before the dessert of fruit and nuts.