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Shrimp Sandwich
Put a layer of potted shrimps between two pieces of white bread and butter, and after pressing the sandwich gently down, cut it with a sharp knife neatly round the edges. It is usual, before closing in, to spread a little made mustard over the meat.
A two-line assembly rather than a recipe, and it stands or falls on the potted shrimps. A few notes on what the Victorian pantry supplied and what you will have to substitute.
- Potted shrimpsBrown shrimps cooked and set in spiced clarified butter, traditionally with mace, cayenne and sometimes nutmeg. Sold in tubs in Britain; elsewhere, chopped cooked small shrimp bound with softened butter, mace and cayenne, then chilled firm, is the working equivalent.
- Let them softenPotted shrimps come out of the refrigerator as a solid block of butter and will tear the bread. Leave them at room temperature for fifteen to twenty minutes so the butter is spreadable but not oily.
- "Made mustard"Prepared mustard, as opposed to dry mustard powder; in a British book of this date that would most likely be English mustard mixed with water, sharp and hot. A thin scrape is all the instruction intends; a modern Dijon is milder and can be used more freely.
- "The meat"Period usage for the filling, not an indication that anything other than shrimp goes in. The mustard goes on the shrimp layer, not on the buttered bread.
- Bread and butterIn period usage "bread and butter" means the slices are buttered before the filling goes on, which helps keep moisture from soaking in; thin slices are usual for sandwiches of this kind. Cutting "neatly round the edges" probably takes the crusts off along with the trimming.
- Pressing and cuttingPress with the flat of the hand only — hard pressure squeezes the butter out at the sides. Chilling the closed sandwich for ten minutes before trimming gives a much cleaner cut.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. A round of bread (two slices) will give two to four small sandwiches once trimmed; roughly two rounds a head is a reasonable allowance for a tea or savoury course.
Potting — sealing cooked meat, fish or shellfish under a layer of clarified butter — was the English larder's answer to preservation before refrigeration, and shrimps from Morecambe Bay and the Thames estuary were among the shellfish most associated with potting in nineteenth-century Britain. Potted shrimps were also sold ready-made by this date, which may be why the entry assumes the reader simply has some to hand rather than telling them how to make it. The sandwich itself belongs to the Victorian fashion for small trimmed sandwiches at afternoon tea and in picnic and shooting baskets, where a filling that arrived already sealed in butter was a practical virtue. The mustard is characteristic of the period's savoury palate, which liked shellfish met with something sharp — the same instinct that puts cayenne in the potting butter in the first place.