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Prawns, Stewed
Pick the tails from a pint of freshly-boiled prawns. Bruise the shells, and put them with the heads into a saucepan with a pint of white wine and water, then add a dessert-spoonful of vinegar, half a blade of mace, and a little cayenne. Let them simmer gently for half an hour. Strain the liquid, put it back into the saucepan, thicken with a tea-spoonful of flour mixed smoothly with a little butter, and boil till it is of the consistency of thick cream. Put in the tails of the prawns, and let them get quite hot. Toast a slice of the crumb of bread, and cut it into strips. Lay these in their original form on a dish, pour the stewed prawns over them, and serve very hot. Garnish with parsley. Time, three or four minutes to heat the prawns. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A shell-stock sauce dressed up as a stew. The prawns are already cooked when they go in, so everything hangs on the liquid you build from the debris.
- The hinge: the prawns barely cookThey go in only to warm through — the stated three or four minutes is generous. Cooked prawns held in simmering sauce turn dry and squeaky within a few minutes, so add them off the heat or at the barest simmer and serve immediately.
- "A pint of prawns" is a volume, not a weightWhole boiled prawns measured loose in a pint jug come to somewhere in the region of three-quarters of a pound to a pound, depending on their size, which might yield 4-6 oz of picked tails. Buy about 1 lb of shell-on cooked prawns, or 5 oz peeled plus a handful of shells begged from the fishmonger.
- "A pint of white wine and water" is ambiguousThe original does not say the proportion. Half and half gives a sauce that tastes of wine without souring; the pint of the book is an imperial pint of 20 fl oz, so that is 10 fl oz of each.
- Bruise, don't pulveriseCrack the shells and heads with the end of a rolling pin so they give up their flavour, but keep the pieces large enough to catch in a sieve. Strain through a fine mesh, and through muslin if you want the sauce glossy rather than gritty.
- Spoon sizesA Victorian dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons. Flour and butter rubbed together cold is beurre manié — whisk it in in small pieces and let the sauce boil a minute to lose the raw taste.
- MaceHalf a blade is a fragment of the lacy coating of a nutmeg, warm and slightly floral. If you only have ground, use a pinch and strain carefully, since it will not sieve out cleanly.
- Crumb of breadThis means a thick slice with the crust cut off, toasted and cut into fingers, then reassembled on the dish so the sauce soaks in without the plate flooding. Rounds of fried bread do the same job and stay crisper.
- Yield\"Four or five persons\" assumes this is one small course among several. As a modern lunch or supper dish it will serve two, perhaps three.
Stewed prawns belong to a large family of Victorian English "stews" in which shellfish is warmed in a sauce rather than actually stewed — the same logic governs stewed oysters and stewed lobster. The interesting economy here is the shell stock: rather than throw away heads and carapaces, the cook simmers them with wine and mace to draw out flavour, a habit English kitchens shared with French *bisque* practice long before restaurant shellfish stock became routine at home. The late nineteenth-century cookery compilations written for middle-class households are full of such dishes: cheap protein, a little wine, toast underneath to stretch it, and parsley to make it look like something. The toast laid "in their original form" — strips reassembled into the shape of the slice — is a small piece of period table presentation.