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SHRIMP PIE (another way)
Pick three pints of shrimps from the shells. Mix with them two or three anchovies, washed, boned, and shredded very fine, some shredded parsley, two chopped shallots, and a handful of very small bleached mushrooms. Butter well the bottom of a pie-dish with good fresh butter, and put the shrimps into it, seasoning them with a little black pepper and some cayenne; if not salt enough add a little, making allowance, however, for the salt of the anchovies, for it too salt the pie will be worthless. Place over the shrimps several lumps of fresh butter, amounting in all to a quarter of a pound, also two hard-boiled eggs, shelled and cut into quarters. Pour into the dish a good glassful of sherry, and also a good glassful of broth, in which has been previously mixed a dessert-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, and a tea-spoonful of soy. Put a good substantial crust over the pie, and bake in a quick oven.
A Victorian fish pie built on already-cooked shrimps, which means the oven's job is to brown the crust and heat the filling, not to cook the shellfish. Everything else follows from that.
- Keep the bake shortThe shrimps go in cooked and will toughen if they sit in a hot oven. Bake only until the crust is set and coloured, and serve at once.
- "A quick oven"Conventionally reckoned at roughly 400-450F (200-230C). The high heat is for the pastry lid; a slower oven gives you a pale crust and overcooked shrimp.
- Three pints of shrimpsMost likely three pints measured in the shell before picking, the small brown shrimps sold by volume at a Victorian fishmonger; the picked weight is a good deal less and hard to pin down. Cooked and peeled small cold-water shrimp are the closest modern equivalent; larger prawns work but should be halved.
- A glassfulA wineglass in nineteenth-century English cookery is usually reckoned at 2 to 2 1/2 fl oz, so something like 1/4 cup each of sherry and broth, and the recipe asks for a good one. Use a dry sherry, not cream.
- Soy and mushroom ketchup"Soy" here means soy sauce, then sold as a bottled table sauce. Mushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, still made commercially; Worcestershire sauce is the nearest substitute, though it is sharper. Both, plus the anchovies, are salt sources.
- The salt warning is realAnchovies, soy, mushroom ketchup and salted broth stack up fast in a shallow dish with very little liquid to dilute them. Taste the seasoned filling before the crust goes on and add no salt unless it genuinely needs it.
- "Bleached mushrooms"Small white button mushrooms, whitened rather than browned; the usual period methods were peeling and rubbing with lemon or salt, or a brief blanch. Skipping it costs nothing but colour.
- The crust"a good substantial crust" means a sturdy lid over the dish, and the recipe says nothing about the pastry beyond that. Cut a vent so the sherry and broth do not lift it.
- YieldProbably serves four to six as a main course.
Cassell's belongs to the era when English cooks treated the shrimp as a seasoning as much as a fish, and this pie has something of potted shrimps about it: the same small cold-water brown shrimps and the same quarter-pound of butter. What dates it is the trio of bottled sauces. Mushroom ketchup, soy and anchovy were standard savoury shortcuts of the Victorian store cupboard, all of them umami concentrates in an age with no word for the idea; soy and anchovy in particular are among the components of the bottled sauces of the Worcestershire type. Sherry with shellfish was equally conventional, a habit generally traced to the long English trade in Spanish fortified wine. The recipe assumes what a Victorian household took for granted, that the shrimps arrived boiled and in the shell and that someone had the patience to pick three pints of them.