Prawn Soup
INGREDIENTS for Two quarts of fish soup for 8 persons. stock, two pints of prawns, the crumb of a French roll, anchovy sauce or mushroom ketchup to taste, one blade of mace, 1/4 pint of vinegar, a little lemon-juice. AVERAGE COST, 5s.
Pick out the tails of the prawns, put the bodies in a stewpan with I blade of mace, a PRAWNS. 1/4 pint of vinegar and the same quantity of water; stew them for hour, and strain off the liquor. Put the fish stock into stewpan; add the strained liquor, pound the prawns with the crumb of a roll moistened with a little of the soup, rub them through a tammy and mix them by degrees with the soup; add ketchup or anchovy sauce to taste, with a little lemon-juice.
When it is well cooked, put in a few picked prawns; let them get thoroughly hot, and serve. If not thick encugh , put in a little butter and flour.
TIME.-1 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Note. This can be thickened with tomatoes.. and vermicelli served in it, which makes it a very tasteful soup.
A Victorian shellfish bisque in the older sense: the shells and bodies carry the flavour, breadcrumbs do the thickening, and the picked tails go in at the last minute. Two quarts serves eight as a first course.
- The ingredient lineRead it as two quarts of fish stock, two pints of prawns, the crumb of a French roll, and the seasonings listed. A pint of prawns is a volume measure of whole prawns in the shell; the recipe gives no weight, so buy by eye rather than by a fixed conversion.
- The hingeMuch of the flavour here comes from the heads and shells, so pick the tails out, set them aside, and simmer only the bodies. The tails will toughen if boiled through the whole of the stock-making.
- Simmering time for the bodiesTwenty to thirty minutes in the vinegar and water is ample; the original's longer stewing is not needed to get the flavour out.
- The vinegarA quarter pint (an imperial 5 fl oz, a good half cup and a little more) of vinegar with equal water is a sharp cooking liquor by modern taste. Use a mild white wine vinegar, and hold back some of the strained liquor to add at the end so you can judge the acidity against the finished soup.
- Rubbing through a tammyA tammy is a fine worsted straining cloth, worked with two people twisting the ends. A food processor followed by a fine sieve or chinois does the same job; press hard, then discard the shell debris.
- Reheating the picked tailsTwo minutes in the hot soup, off the boil, is enough. Raw prawns turn opaque almost at once and go rubbery if held longer, and cooked ones need only to warm through.
- Mace and anchovyA blade of mace is one piece of the lacy outer covering of nutmeg, still sold whole; a pinch of ground mace substitutes. Anchovy sauce was a thin bottled seasoning esspaste thinned with water or a dash of Worcestershire gets you close, added by the teaspoon.
- If not thick enoughBeurre manié, true butter and flour kneaded to a paste, is whisked in a little at a time and simmered a few minutes to cook out the raw flour. The bread crumb alone gives a soft, slightly grainy body rather than a glossy one.
Prawn soup of this kind belongs to the older English family of shellfish potages that thickened with pounded flesh and bread rather than cream or roux the same method that produced crayfish and lobster "bisks" in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English cookery. Beeton's household books assume a cook with a mortar, a tammy cloth and the patience to use both, and the technique of pounding shells to a paste and straining them is the direct ancestor of the modern shellfish bisque made in a blender. The costing of five shillings places it among the more expensive soups in the book; prawns reached inland English kitchens in quantity only after the railways, which is why the entry can claim the soup is seasonable at any time. The closing note about tomatoes and vermicelli reflects the English appetite for Italian-inflected garnishes in what had been a plain repertoire, though neither ingredient can be used to date the page.