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Shrimp Pie
Take as many shrimps as will almost fill the dish, pick them, and season with cayenne, pounded mace, a little salt, and vinegar or lemon pickle. A small proportion of essence of anchovies may be added, if liked. Butter a pie-dish rather thickly, and line the edges with puff-paste. Put in the shrimps, pour over them a glassful of light wine and a small cupful of rich gravy, cover the dish with puff-paste, and bake in a well-heated oven. For a maigre dish the gravy must be omitted. Time to bake a moderate-sized pie, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost of shrimps, 2d. to 4d. per pint.
A Victorian potted-shrimp pie in all but name: seasoned shellfish under a pastry lid, sharpened with vinegar and anchovy. The one thing to understand before starting is that the shrimps are already cooked, so the bake is about the pastry, not the filling.
- Shrimps by the pintVictorian brown shrimps were generally sold cooked, in their shells, by volume; a pint of unpicked shrimps yields only a few ounces of meat. Roughly 12 oz of small cooked, peeled shrimp will fill a medium pie dish. "Pick them" means shell them.
- The bake timeThree-quarters of an hour will turn cooked shrimp to rubber and dry the dish out entirely. Puff paste over a shallow filling needs about 20 to 25 minutes; the pie is done when the crust is risen and browned.
- A well-heated ovenRead this as 425F for puff pastry, which needs strong initial heat to lift. A cooler oven gives a greasy, flat lid.
- Pounded maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg, sold today ground or as blades. About a quarter teaspoon ground is enough for a pie of this size; it is the defining flavour of English potted shrimp.
- Lemon pickle and essence of anchoviesLemon pickle was a spiced, salted lemon preserve that appears in many Georgian and Victorian cookery books. A tablespoon of preserved-lemon paste, or simply lemon juice with a pinch of salt, stands in for it. Essence of anchovies was a bottled liquid anchovy seasoning; anchovy paste is the nearest modern equivalent, and a scant teaspoon is plenty, as it is very salty alongside the pickle.
- A glassful of wineA wineglassful in this period is generally reckoned at 2 to 2.5 fl oz. Use a dry white; "light wine" here means unfortified, as opposed to sherry or madeira.
- Rich gravyThis means a reduced, well-flavoured meat stock, not a thickened flour sauce. Combined with the wine the filling will be quite loose, so butter the dish thickly as directed and seal the pastry edge properly.
- The maigre versionOmitting the gravy makes the pie suitable for fast days, when meat was forbidden. Fish stock or a little more wine keeps it from going dry.
- YieldA moderate-sized pie dish serves four as a light main course or six as a savoury course.
Shrimp cookery of this kind belongs to the English coastal tradition of small brown shrimps -- Morecambe Bay, the Wash, the Thames estuary -- boiled on landing and sold by the pint, shells and all. The seasoning here, mace with cayenne and butter, is exactly that of potted shrimps, the older preserving method in which the picked shrimps were packed under clarified butter to keep; encasing them in pastry instead is a genteel variation on the same flavours. The note on cost, two to four pence a pint, marks shrimps as a cheap food, which is why a household manual could recommend filling a dish with them. The instruction for a maigre dish -- from the French for lean, meaning without meat -- reflects the persistence of fast-day cooking in Victorian household manuals, which routinely gave both a meat and a meatless form of fish dishes for Fridays and Lent.