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Shrimps, Lobsters, and Crabs
May all be prepared the same way. Boil them according to size over a brisk fire, with a handful of salt in the water, pepper, vinegar, parsley, bay-leaves, thyme, and chives. While boiling put a red-hot poker several times into the water to give the fish a fire colour; when done, let them remain in the liquor till cold, then take them out, drain them, and rub them with a little butter or oil; break the claws and split them through the back.
A single court-bouillon method covering three shellfish, written when a cook was expected to know the timings already. The gaps worth filling are the times, the salt, and the red-hot poker.
- Time by weight, not by eye"According to size" means roughly: shrimp and prawns 2-3 minutes once the water returns to the boil; a 1 lb lobster about 8 minutes, adding 3-4 minutes for each additional pound; a crab 12-15 minutes for a small one, up to 20 for a large. Overcooked shellfish turns cottony and no amount of butter rescues it.
- The poker does nothingPlunging a red-hot poker into the pot was believed to deepen the shell colour. The red comes from astaxanthin released by heat as the shell proteins denature, and it happens at boiling point regardless. Dropping hot iron into water also throws scalding steam. Skip it.
- Salt the water properly"A handful" is meant to approximate seawater, which is about 35 g of salt per litre, or a scant 2 tablespoons per quart. Under-salting is the commonest fault; the shell keeps most of it out of the meat.
- The aromatics are a court-bouillonPepper, vinegar, parsley, bay, thyme and chives make a short court-bouillon. A splash of vinegar per quart is enough; more will start to firm and sour the meat. Bring the water to the boil with the herbs in it before the shellfish go in.
- Cooling in the liquorThis is the instruction most worth keeping. Meat left to cool in its cooking water is generally held to stay moister than shellfish drained hot. Cool the pot quickly to room temperature, then refrigerate if it will sit more than an hour.
- Buying and dispatchingLobsters and crabs were bought live in this period and mostly still are. Current humane-handling guidance commonly suggests chilling the animal in the freezer for 20-30 minutes to sedate it, then killing it swiftly before boiling rather than putting it in live. Cooked-and-chilled crab from a fishmonger skips the question entirely.
- The butter rub and the splitRubbing the cold shell with butter or oil is essentially cosmetic, for gloss on a cold table. "Split them through the back" means cutting the lobster lengthways in half with a heavy knife, so the two halves sit shell-down on the dish; crack the claws with the back of the blade rather than a mallet, which shatters shell into the meat.
- YieldAllow one 1 to 1 1/4 lb lobster or one medium crab per person as a main course, or about 1/2 lb of shell-on shrimp per person as a starter.
Cassell's treats shrimp, lobster and crab as one entry because in the Victorian and Edwardian kitchen they arrived by the same route and were treated the same way: boiled whole at the fishmonger's or in the scullery, cooled, and sent to table cold with a salad or dressed in the shell. The court-bouillon of vinegar, bay, thyme and chives is a French inheritance, standard for shellfish and delicate fish alike. The red-hot poker is the period detail: it turns up in nineteenth-century English cookery books and is usually explained as a way to force a deeper scarlet into the shell, a bit of kitchen lore of the same family as the copper bowl for greens or the coin in the boiling pot. Lobster in this era appeared in salads, patties and sauces as much as on its own, before its twentieth-century reinvention as a luxury.