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Potted Shrimps
Pick some shrimps from their shells, season them to taste with salt and cayenne, and pack them tightly in pots. Have some butter in a saucepan over the fire, and when it boils, pour it over the shrimps until they are quite covered and the pots nearly filled; allow them to get quite cold, then pour over the top boiling butter and lard mixed so that the air cannot reach the butter first poured in. The shrimps may be pounded and softened with butter, then pressed into a shallow jar, and covered with oiled butter.
This is a preserving method, not simply a spread: the butter and lard cap is there to keep the shrimps for weeks in a cool larder. That is where it fails by current standards.
- The sealed fat cap is the problemButter poured over packed shrimp and then capped with a second layer of butter and lard creates a deliberately airless environment around a low-acid, moist, high-protein food. That is the exact condition in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin, and the non-proteolytic strains associated with seafood can do so slowly even under refrigeration.
- No cooking step is specifiedThe recipe assumes you are working from shrimps already boiled, but never says so. The butter is poured on boiling, but nothing holds the packed pots at a given internal temperature for a measured time, and in any case boiling will not destroy botulinum spores.
- No cure, no acid, no measured salt"Season them to taste with salt and cayenne" gives no weight of salt and no acidification. Modern potted and confit preparations that are considered safe rely on measured salt or nitrite, controlled pH, or refrigeration with a short fixed shelf life. None of those controls exist here.
- Storage is the intentThe whole point of the double seal, described as keeping air from the butter first poured in, is pantry keeping. Read as a keeping recipe it is unsafe; there is no version of the written method that makes it sound.
- If you want the dishPotted shrimps are still made commercially and domestically, but under a current recipe with refrigeration and a defined use-by window. Use one of those rather than this text.
Potting is the English counterpart to the French confit: cooked flesh packed tight, covered with fat, and kept in a cool larder. Potted shrimps in particular are associated with the small brown shrimp of Morecambe Bay and the Lancashire coast, traditionally seasoned with mace, nutmeg or cayenne, and by the nineteenth century they were a familiar item on British breakfast and supper tables. The second covering, of butter and lard mixed, is there, as the recipe says, to keep the air from the butter poured in first.