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Shrimp Forcemeat
Mix shelled shrimps with an equal quantity of grated bread-crumbs, and season the mixture with salt, cayenne, and pounded mace. Pound it in a mortar, soften with fresh butter, and bind together with yolk of egg. Forcemeat thus made is very excellent for filling any kind of freshwater fish, but is especially suited for pike and eel.
A short Victorian stuffing formula with no quantities beyond the shrimp-to-crumb ratio. It works, but it needs a few decisions made for it.
- Start here: the crumbs"Grated bread-crumbs" means dry crumbs grated from a stale loaf, not the soft fresh crumb of a food processor and not the sandy commercial kind. Dry crumbs absorb the shrimp juices and butter and hold the forcemeat together; fresh crumbs turn it to paste.
- A working quantityFor a 3 lb pike or a pair of eels, 8 oz peeled cooked shrimp to 8 oz dry crumbs (reading the recipe's "equal quantity" as by weight; it does not say), 2 oz softened butter and 1 large egg yolk gives a little over 1 lb of forcemeat. Season with roughly 1 tsp salt, a pinch of cayenne and 1/4 tsp mace.
- ShrimpsIn a British book of this period "shrimps" most likely means small brown shrimp, boiled and then shelled by the cook; tiny cold-water shrimp are the closest equivalent elsewhere. Large raw prawns are wetter and coarser; if using them, cook and chop them small first so the forcemeat still binds.
- MacePounded mace is the dried aril, the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, and is less sweet than the seed itself. Ground mace from a jar loses its scent quickly; grated nutmeg can stand in, used sparingly.
- Pounding without a mortarA few short pulses in a food processor stands in for the mortar. Stop while some texture remains, or the shrimp emulsifies with the butter and the stuffing bakes into a dense block.
- Cooking itThe forcemeat is raw when it goes into the fish, so it must reach 165F at the centre of the cavity. A stuffed 3 lb pike takes roughly 40-50 minutes at 350F; check the stuffing, not just the fish, as the fish flesh will be done first.
- Bind and slackIf the mixture crumbles when squeezed, add a second yolk rather than more butter. Butter alone loosens it in the pan and it runs out of the fish.
Forcemeat — from the French farce, a stuffing, by way of the older English farce-meat — was a whole department of nineteenth-century cookery, and cookery books carried versions keyed to particular meats and fish. Pike and eel were the practical reason for a shellfish version: both are muddy-tasting freshwater fish that were cheap and common in Britain well into the Victorian period, and both were traditionally baked whole with a rich stuffing. Brown shrimp, landed in quantity on the Lancashire and Norfolk coasts and sold potted or boiled, were the everyday shellfish of the period rather than a luxury. The pairing of a sea shellfish with river fish also reflects an older taste, still visible in Georgian cookery, for shrimp and anchovy sauces served with almost any fish at all.