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Shrimp Salad
Shell a quart of freshly-boiled shrimps, and pile them in the centre of a dish. Boil three eggs hard, and mince the whites and yolks separately. Sprinkle the whites round the shrimps, place a single row of green capers next, and then the chopped yolks. Surround the whole with lettuces cut into quarters and with water-cress, and garnish the dish with gherkins and boiled beetroot, or little pieces of pickled red cabbage. Send salad sauce to table in a boat.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one: the point is the concentric arrangement, and everything must be cold and dry before it goes on the dish.
- A quart of shrimpsThe measure is of shrimps in the shell, and it means the small brown or pink shrimps of the British coast, not tiger prawns. A quart in the shell yields something like half a pound of picked meat, so roughly 8 oz of cooked peeled small shrimp is a fair substitute.
- Salad sauceCassell's salad sauces are generally built on egg yolk with cream or oil, sharpened with mustard and vinegar, and are thinner and sharper than modern bottled mayonnaise. Any well-seasoned mayonnaise loosened with cream and a little tarragon vinegar will sit correctly with shrimp.
- The hard eggsTen minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, keeps the yolks yellow rather than grey-green. Push the yolks through a sieve rather than chopping them; they scatter far more evenly.
- Keep the rings drySauce is sent separately for a reason. If the shrimps are wet or the cress is not thoroughly shaken dry, the minced white and yolk turn to paste and the pattern is lost within minutes.
- Green capersNonpareil capers in brine, drained and blotted. Salt-packed capers need a rinse and a soak or they will overpower a quart of delicately sweet shrimp.
- Beetroot and red cabbageBoth bleed. Cut the beetroot at the last moment and set it on the rim of the dish, not against the egg white.
- Assemble lateBuild no more than half an hour before serving and keep it refrigerated. Shrimp held dressed and warm is the classic route to trouble.
- YieldServes four as a first course or two as a light lunch with bread and butter.
Cassell's belongs to the last decades of the nineteenth century, when British inshore shrimping — the Thames estuary, Morecambe Bay, the Norfolk coast — put cheap boiled shrimps on urban tables by rail within a day of landing, and cookery writers responded with dozens of ways to use them beyond potting. This salad is a straightforward example of a Victorian habit of composition: ingredients laid in bands or rings on a flat dish so the effect is decorative before it is edible, with the dressing sent separately in a boat so the arrangement survives its journey to the table. The sieved yolk is the same trick later cooks called mimosa, after the blossom it resembles. That the recipe assumes shrimps are shelled at home, and that a quart is the natural unit, says a good deal about how they were sold: by volume, in the shell, still faintly warm from the boiling copper on the quay.