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Prawns, Potted
Pick fresh prawns after they have been boiled. Cut them lightly, and pound them in a marble mortar with a small quantity of fresh butter, a seasoning of cayenne and powdered mace or grated nutmeg, and a little salt, if necessary, but it is probable that they will not require it. Put them into jars, cover with clarified butter lukewarm, and tie a bladder securely over them. Time to boil, eight minutes.
A short, workable recipe once you separate the flavouring from the preserving. The butter seal was the whole point in 1900; today it is texture and nothing more.
- Treat it as a fresh dish, not a preserveThe clarified butter and bladder were meant to exclude air for weeks in a cool larder. Cooked shellfish under fat is exactly the wrong environment to trust at room temperature — keep the pots refrigerated and eat within three days.
- The eight minutes is for the shellsThe note at the end refers to boiling the prawns whole before picking. Raw prawns in the shell need two to four minutes in salted water depending on size; eight minutes at a full boil is how you get cotton wool. If you buy them already cooked, skip this step entirely.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. For 1 lb of picked cooked prawns, work in 4 oz softened butter, a good pinch of cayenne and half a teaspoon of ground mace or nutmeg. Salt only after tasting — sea-boiled prawns often need none, as the text says.
- Mortar or machineA marble mortar gives a coarse, fibrous paste that still reads as prawn. A food processor will do it in seconds but goes to wallpaper paste just as fast; use short pulses and stop while some texture remains.
- "Cut them lightly"Chop them roughly first so the pounding is even. Reserving a handful of whole small prawns to fold in at the end gives a better mouthful than a uniform paste.
- Clarified butter, lukewarmMelt butter gently, let the milk solids settle, and pour off the clear fat only — the solids are what turn a sealed pot sour. Lukewarm matters: butter poured hot will melt into the potted mixture instead of setting as a lid over it.
- Instead of a bladderA cleaned bladder (usually pig or ox) tied over the rim was the period's cover, shrinking tight as it dried to give a close seal. Use a disc of baking parchment and a lid, or simply cling film pressed to the surface.
- Yield and serving1 lb of prawns fills four to six small ramekins. Bring them to just below room temperature before eating — fridge-cold butter mutes both the cayenne and the mace — and serve with thin brown toast.
Potting was England's standard method for holding cooked fish, shellfish and game meats before refrigeration: pound the flesh with butter and spice, pack it tight, and seal the top with a layer of clarified fat that keeps air off. Spices such as mace, nutmeg and cayenne did double duty as flavouring and, it was believed, as preservatives. Potted shrimps from Morecambe Bay are the version that survived into the modern British repertoire, but potted prawns, lobster, salmon, char and beef all appear routinely in nineteenth-century household books. The bladder called for here — a cleaned pig's bladder stretched wet over the jar and left to shrink tight as it dried — was ordinary butcher's stock at the time, and its appearance in a recipe is a fair marker of a book still writing for a larder rather than an icebox.