Crayfish, Potted
INGREDIENTS. 50 crayfish; pounded mace, pepper and salt to taste; 4 oz. butter. AVERAGE COST, 6s. 8d.
Boil the fish in salt and water, pick out all the meat, and pound it in a mortar to a paste. Whilst pounding, add the butter gradually, and mix in the spice and seasoning. Put it in small pots, and pour over it clarified butter, carefully excluding the air.
TIME.-15 minutes to boil the crayfish.
SEASONABLE all the year. -
A Victorian potted fish paste: boiled crayfish tails pounded with butter and spice, packed into pots and sealed under clarified butter. The technique is sound; the sourcing, the boiling time and the storage assumptions all need rethinking.
- Which crayfishBeeton, writing in Britain, most likely means the small native white-clawed crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes), though the related European noble crayfish (Astacus astacus) was also traded; both were sold live in quantity in nineteenth-century markets. The white-clawed crayfish is now a protected species in Britain and must not be taken from the wild; use farmed or imported crayfish, invasive signal crayfish where they are legally sold, or substitute langoustine or shell-on prawns.
- Quantity and yieldFifty small crayfish give roughly 6-8 oz (175-225 g) of picked tail and claw meat, which with the 4 oz butter fills two or three small ramekins - about six servings as a starter on toast. If you are working from shelled meat, aim for about two parts meat to one part butter by weight.
- Boiling timeThe recipe allows fifteen minutes. Dropped into fast-boiling salted water, crayfish of this size are done in about 4-6 minutes depending on size; longer than that and the tail meat turns cottony and picks badly.
- The butter must be soft, not meltedThe butter should be soft rather than melted -- Butter at cool room temperature, worked in a little at a time as the original's "add the butter gradually" suggests, blends most smoothly into the pounded meat; butter poured in melted is more likely to separate out into a greasy layer and a dry one.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but pulse rather than run it - crayfish meat overworked into a purée loses the slight fibrous texture that makes potted fish worth eating. Some cooks reserve a spoonful of chopped meat to fold back in at the end.
- MacePounded mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg, warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself. Ground mace from a jar is fine; about a quarter teaspoon for this quantity, with a pinch of cayenne, matches the Victorian palate for potted shellfish.
- Clarified butterMelt butter gently, skim the foam, and pour off the clear fat leaving the milky solids behind. Clarified butter sets to a far better seal than whole butter, which carries water and milk solids that spoil under it.
- StorageThe butter seal was a keeping method in an unrefrigerated larder, and should not be trusted as one now. Treat this as a fresh spread: refrigerate as soon as it is cool, keep it cold, and eat within two or three days. A sealed pot of low-acid fish held at room temperature is exactly the condition botulism spores favour.
Potting - cooking a meat or fish, pounding it with butter and spice, and sealing it under a layer of clarified fat - was the standard English answer to preservation before canning, used for everything from beef and venison to shrimps, lampreys and char. Freshwater crayfish were plentiful in English chalk streams and rivers through the nineteenth century and appeared in cookery books; the recipe itself quotes a cost of 6s 8d, a substantial sum. The native population later collapsed under crayfish plague and competition from introduced American signal crayfish, which is why a dish Beeton could call "seasonable all the year" is now an unusual thing to cook at home. The seasoning here - mace, pepper, a great deal of butter - is the same formula that produced potted shrimps, which are still made commercially today.