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SHRIMPS AND ASPARAGUS (a Danish recipe)
Scrape twenty-five sticks of asparagus of middle size, cut them into pieces about an inch long, boil them in half a pint of water and a little salt. When tender, drain them. Pick a pint of boiled shrimps, pound the shells with a little butter, set it on the fire to brown; by degrees pour over it half a pint of hot water or thin bouillon, and, lastly, the water in which the asparagus has been boiled. When it has boiled rather less than half an hour, strain it; set it on the fire again with an ounce of flour mixed in a little butter, and thinned with some of the warm liquor; when smooth, add it to the sauce; let it boil, and then put in the picked shrimps and asparagus, together with a tea-spoonful of pounded sugar, a little salt, and, if liked, grated nutmeg; give it a boil up. Put it into the centre of a dish upon thin slices of toasted bread, or lay fish roulettes round the dish. Lobsters and crabs may be dressed in like manner with a rice border round, and stewed cauliflower mixed with the lobsters.
A shrimp-shell sauce thickened at the last minute, essentially a small bisque used as a binding for asparagus. The one thing to watch is the final boil: already-cooked shrimp turn to erasers if they sit in simmering liquid.
- Add the shrimps off the heatThe instruction to "give it a boil up" with the picked shrimps in place is the weak point. Bring the sauce to a boil first, then fold in the shrimps and asparagus and let them warm through for a minute or two on the lowest heat.
- Quantities in volumeA pint of picked boiled shrimps is perhaps 8-12 oz of shelled small shrimp, though the yield from whole shrimp varies a great deal with size; expect to buy well over a pound in the shell. Twenty-five medium asparagus spears is roughly 1 lb, about a standard bunch.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, so read both the asparagus water and the added bouillon as about 1 1/4 US cups each.
- The shell butterPound or pulse the shells with a good knob of butter (the recipe says only "a little") and brown them properly in a wide pan; this is where much of the colour and flavour come from. Give them several minutes and stop when the shells smell toasted, not scorched.
- StrainingShell fragments are sharp, so strain through a fine sieve lined with muslin rather than a colander. Press the solids firmly to get the butter back out of them.
- The thickeningAn ounce of flour worked into butter is in effect a beurre manie; use roughly an equal weight of butter. The recipe thins it with a little of the warm liquor before adding it to the sauce, then boils it; simmer a couple of minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- Sugar and nutmegThe teaspoonful of pounded sugar (loaf sugar pounded fine, roughly the fineness of caster) and the grating of nutmeg are seasonings often met with in Northern European shellfish dishes, and read here as seasoning rather than garnish. Use a light hand with the nutmeg.
- ServingToast the bread hard and place it under the mixture only at the moment of serving, or it will collapse. The quantities serve four as a first course, two as a light supper.
Cassell's collected dishes from across Europe and labelled them by nationality, and this one carries the marks of a Danish kitchen: tiny cold-water shrimp picked by hand, spring asparagus, and the sweet-and-nutmeg seasoning that runs through Scandinavian and North German shellfish cookery. The shrimp in question would have been the small brown or grey sort landed in quantity around the North Sea and the Danish coasts, sold already boiled and needing only to be shelled -- a fiddly job, and many nineteenth-century recipes call for them by the pint rather than the pound. Pounding the shells with butter and browning them is the older domestic form of what a professional kitchen would build into a bisque. The closing note about lobster, crab, rice borders and cauliflower is typical of the dictionary's habit of squeezing three variations into the tail of one entry, aimed at a cook working from a single volume rather than a shelf of them.