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Tartines of Shrimps
Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a small saucepan, add four finely chopped shallots, a half bean garlic, also finely chopped, and gently cook for three minutes, then add a level tablespoon flour and stir well while heating for a half minute. Pour in a gill white wine, half gill milk, tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, half teaspoon each French mustard and salt, a saltspoon cayenne, half saltspoon each grated nutmeg and freshly chopped parsley, and continually mix while boiling for two minutes. Add one and a half pounds shelled, cooked shrimps, mix well and let cook for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile, then add two egg yolks, sharply stir with wooden spoon while heating for two minutes, place in mortar, pound to a fine pulp, remove and press pulp through sieve into a bowl. Brown six fresh pieces toast, a quarter-inch thick by three inches square, to a nice golden colour, lightly butter, then evenly spread shrimp preparation over. Neatly smooth surface, lightly butter top of each; place on a tin and set in oven for six minutes. Remove, dress on dish with a folded napkin, decorate with six quarters lemon and a little parsley greens and serve.
A savoury shrimp paste spread on toast and browned — essentially a hot potted-shrimp canapé. The measurements are Edwardian but the method translates cleanly once you stop overcooking the shrimp.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is 1/2 cup, so this is 1/2 cup white wine and 1/4 cup milk. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, making the cayenne a quarter teaspoon and the nutmeg and parsley about 1/8 teaspoon each.
- Half bean garlic"Bean" here means clove; use half a clove, finely minced. Four shallots, finely chopped, comes to roughly 1/3 cup.
- French mustardA prepared French mustard of the Dijon type, as distinct from English mustard powder.
- The ten-minute simmerThis is the instruction to ignore. Shrimp already cooked and then held on the heat for ten minutes goes cottony, and the pounding cannot rescue texture it has lost. Two or three minutes to warm through and absorb the sauce is enough before the yolks go in.
- Yolks off the boilAfter the yolks are stirred in, the pan must not boil or the sauce curdles and the paste turns grainy. Keep it just below a simmer for the two minutes and stir constantly.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in twenty seconds. Push the puree through a fine sieve anyway — it removes the shrimp's fibrous bits and is the difference between a paste and a mince.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Six minutes to glaze a buttered surface suggests a hot oven, around 400-425F, or a few minutes under the broiler watched closely.
- YieldSix 3-inch toasts from 1 1/2 lb shrimp is generous; the paste will comfortably cover a dozen. Serves six as a first course, or makes canapés for a larger group.
A tartine is simply a slice of bread spread with something — in French usage most often butter, but by extension any open-faced spread on bread — and dressing hot shrimp paste on toast squares belongs to the wider family of English and French potted-shellfish preparations, where cooked shrimp were pounded with butter and spice to make a keeping paste. What marks this version as restaurant rather than domestic work is the labour: a proper roux-based sauce, then pounding in a mortar, then pressing through a sieve, all for six pieces of toast, finished with a folded napkin on the serving dish. The Worcestershire sauce and cayenne are typical of the Anglo-American savoury of the period, when highly seasoned hot toasts were served either as a first course or at the very end of a long dinner in place of a sweet.