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Shrimps, Stewed
Pick as many freshly-boiled shrimps as will measure a pint when shelled. Bruise the heads and shells, and boil them gently in a quarter of a pint of light wine, a quarter of a pint of water, and a tea-spoonful of vinegar, with a seasoning of salt, cayenne, and mace. Strain the liquor, and let it stand a few minutes. Then pour it off, freed from sediment, put it back into the saucepan, and thicken it with flour and butter. Put in the fish, and simmer them till they are thoroughly heated. They must not boil, or they will be hard. Toast a slice of bread, cut it into small squares, lay it on a dish, and pour upon it the fish and sauce. Serve hot. Time to boil the shells, twenty minutes.
A shrimp stew built on a quick stock made from the shells — the whole point of the dish, and the step most likely to be skipped. Nothing here is difficult, but the quantities are given by volume in imperial measure and the timings need adjusting.
- A pint of shelled shrimpsMeasured by volume, not weight: an imperial pint of picked shrimp meat is somewhere around 12-16 oz (350-450 g) shelled, which given the low yield of small shrimp means starting with appreciably more than that in shell-on weight -- 2 lb at the very least, and more if the shrimp are tiny. Small cold-water shrimp or brown shrimp suit the dish better than large tiger prawns.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, so a generous half cup of wine and the same of water. "Light wine" here means a light-bodied, unfortified wine; a dry, low-tannin white works best -- nothing oaked or sweet.
- MaceA blade of mace steeped in the stock and removed, or about a quarter teaspoon ground. It is the outer covering of nutmeg and appears constantly in English shellfish cookery of this period; nutmeg is a workable substitute but coarser.
- Twenty minutes on the shells, no longerShell stock gives up its flavour fast and then turns bitter and muddy. Bruise the heads and shells first so they fracture, simmer gently for the stated twenty minutes, then strain through a fine sieve and let the grit settle before decanting.
- Flour and butterEqual parts, about a tablespoon of each, worked to a paste and whisked into the hot strained liquor off the boil — a beurre manié rather than a cooked roux. Roughly a cup of stock will take that amount to a coating consistency.
- The instruction that matters"They must not boil, or they will be hard" is the hinge of the recipe. The shrimp are already cooked; one to two minutes in sauce below a simmer is enough to heat them through. Boiled shrimp reheated turn to rubber and shed water into the sauce.
- The toastCut and toast the bread only when the sauce is finished, and pour over at the table. Croûtes laid down early under a flour-thickened sauce collapse into paste.
- YieldEnough for two as a supper dish or four as a first course. A squeeze of lemon and chopped parsley at the end are period-appropriate and welcome.
Stewed shrimps belong to a long English tradition of small-shellfish dishes served on toast — potted shrimps, buttered shrimps, shrimp sauce for turbot — that rested on the tiny brown shrimp of the North Sea and the Thames estuary, sold already boiled by hawkers and fishmongers and expected to be picked at home. That the recipe assumes "freshly-boiled shrimps" rather than raw ones reflects the trade: shrimp were cooked at the point of landing because they spoil quickly, which is also why the heads and shells arrive in the kitchen still full of usable flavour. Cassell's, generally dated to the 1870s and 1880s and intended as a household reference rather than a chef's book, sets the dish alongside others that make a stock from what would otherwise be waste — the same economy that produced fish fumet and crayfish butter in the French kitchen, here scaled down to a saucepan and a slice of toast.