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SHELL FISH, BUISSON, OR THICKET OF (a pretty supper dish)
Four lobsters, a pint of crayfish, and a pint of prawns are needed for this dish. Take a stale loaf of bread, trim away the crust, and cut the crumb to a square block. Hang a lobster on each side of this, with the tail resting on the top of the block and the head in the dish; cover the empty spaces with parsley, and upon this lay crayfish and prawns. Put prawns and parsley round the buisson, and fasten three or four crayfish on the top of it with silver skewers.
This is an assembly, not a cooking method: everything goes on the block already boiled and cold. Cassell's assumes the reader has fish-cook habits it never spells out, so the gaps are worth filling before you buy four lobsters.
- Everything is cooked firstThe entry says nothing about cooking because a Victorian kitchen took it for granted. Lobsters, crayfish and prawns must all be boiled and thoroughly cooled before the buisson is built; the finished pyramid is served cold and never sees heat.
- "A pint" of shellfishSmall shellfish were sold and measured by volume rather than weight. How many that is depends entirely on their size: a pint of whole crayfish may be a dozen or so, a pint of shell-on prawns something under half a pound. Buy by the piece and you will not go far wrong.
- The loaf is scaffoldingThe trimmed block of stale crumb is a socle -- a support, not food. Cut it from a dense white loaf a day or two old, square the sides so the lobsters sit flush, and expect to throw it out afterwards. A small overturned bowl does the same job.
- Crayfish todayThe native white-clawed crayfish of British streams is now a protected species and cannot be taken. Use farmed or imported crayfish, or the invasive signal crayfish where it is legally sold; in North America, crawfish are sold cooked and frozen by the pound.
- Silver skewersThese are hatelets -- ornamental skewers with decorative heads, standard equipment for cold buffet work and now largely a collector's item. Long stainless skewers or plain bamboo hidden under parsley will hold the top crayfish just as well.
- Keep it coldA tall construction of shellfish sitting out in a warm dining room is the one real risk here. Build it on a chilled platter, keep it refrigerated until the moment it goes on the table, and do not let it stand for hours as a centrepiece.
- ServingThe original gives no sauce and no yield. Four lobsters plus the small shellfish would stretch to a supper table of some size; send mayonnaise, or a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing with lemon, round separately, and put finger bowls and picks on the table.
Buisson is French for a bush or thicket, and the name describes exactly what the cook is doing: massing small shellfish into a green-flecked mound so that it reads as foliage with lobsters climbing it. Built-up cold pieces of this kind belong to the nineteenth-century grande cuisine tradition of the socle -- a base of bread, rice paste, wax or lard, hidden by garnish, on which food was arranged for height and effect -- and by the time Cassell's was compiled they had filtered down from Carême-era banquets into the ambitious middle-class supper table. The dish tells you something about how such a table worked: it is entirely make-ahead, it is eaten cold with the fingers, and its whole purpose is to look impressive on a sideboard among cold birds and jellies rather than to be carved and served hot. It also quietly records how cheap crayfish and prawns once were, since a pint of each is treated as mere decoration for the lobsters.