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SHRIMPS, POTTED (another way)
Boil the shrimps in plenty of salt and water. When cold, shell them, and season with white pepper, salt, and pounded mace and nutmeg. Then press them into the pots. Place them during ten minutes in a gentle oven; let them cool, and when cold pour over them clarified butter.
A short, forgiving recipe whose success rests almost entirely on the butter seal and the quality of the shrimp. Two details in the original need translating: the oven, and what "shrimps" meant to a British cook.
- The shrimpThis means the small brown shrimp of the English coast, an inch or so long and sweet enough to eat whole once peeled. Cooked-and-peeled brown shrimp, sold frozen, are the closest thing available; small cold-water pink shrimp will do, chopped if larger than bite-size. Large warm-water prawns give the wrong texture entirely.
- BoilingRaw brown shrimp need one to two minutes in heavily salted boiling water, no more, and should be lifted out the moment they turn opaque. Already-cooked shrimp should not be boiled at all; go straight to seasoning.
- A gentle ovenRoughly 300F (150C). The ten minutes is only to warm the shrimp through and let the spices settle, not to cook them further; the clarified butter goes on later, once the pots are cold.
- Pounded mace and nutmegMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than the nutmeg itself; blade mace ground fresh is far better than the pre-ground jar. Use a scant quarter teaspoon of mace and a smaller pinch of nutmeg per half pound of shrimp, with white pepper to taste.
- The potsSmall straight-sided ramekins or 4 oz jars. Pack the shrimp down firmly so no air pockets remain, but leave a good quarter inch of headroom for the butter.
- Clarified butterMelt unsalted butter gently, skim the foam, and pour off the clear gold, leaving the milky solids behind. Those solids are what makes an unclarified seal go rancid and cloudy. Pour it over cold shrimp so it sets as a clean lid rather than melting into them.
- StorageThe butter seal was a keeping device in an unheated larder, not a preservative by modern standards. Refrigerate the pots as soon as they set and eat within three days; do not hold them at room temperature.
- Yield and servingA pound of peeled shrimp fills four to six small pots. Take them out of the fridge twenty minutes before serving, so the butter softens, and eat with hot toast and lemon.
Potting - packing cooked meat or fish tightly into a pot and sealing it under a layer of fat - was one of the standard English answers to a short season and no refrigeration, and it was applied to everything from beef and tongue to char, salmon and lobster. Shrimps took to it particularly well, and potted shrimp became associated above all with Morecambe Bay in Lancashire, whose brown shrimp fishery is documented as supplying the trade in quantity in the later nineteenth century, once the railway was in place. The mace is not decoration: it was the customary spice for potted fish and shellfish in Britain, and the combination of brown shrimp, mace and butter has changed remarkably little since Cassell's day. That this appears twice in the dictionary, as a main entry and "another way," might be taken as a measure of how routine the dish was on a Victorian supper or breakfast table.