Recipe can be found in 1000 Foods to Eat Before You Die on pages 18 – 19
Before refrigeration, preserving food was always a challenge, particularly for highly perishable things like shellfish. Besides salting, pickling, smoking, and controlled fermentation, cooked meat and fish could be covered in a layer of fat to keep out the oxygen. The French preserved pork in its own fat for rillettes, and duck or goose as confit. For leaner proteins like ham or shrimp, the British “potted” them in ceramic dishes. This process involved mixing the chopped shrimp with melted butter and covering everything with more butter.
Since shrimp were reduced price for quick sale at the store, I thought I would give this recipe a try. Interestingly, though British cuisine has a reputation for being dull and bland, potted shrimp is traditionally seasoned with cayenne pepper and mace. Once the mixture of shrimp and flavored butter is chilled and solidified, it is served on either salad greens or toast.
Mace and cayenne pepper might seem odd for a traditional British dish, but both became popular in the 18th Century. Most likely, this has to do with Britain’s growing influence in India. Modified “curry” dishes began to appear in cookbooks, and the long-term Dutch monopoly on nutmeg (mace comes from the same plant) was broken, allowing the British East India Company to bring cargoes of both spices to Europe. A little spice goes a long way in a generally bland diet, especially when fresh food was unavailable for much of the year.
Note that mace isn’t widely available in grocery stores, but is easy to find in specialty spice stores and online. Because you’ll probably have to buy more than you need, it’s a good idea to buy whole mace and grind it yourself. Whole spices stay fresh for longer.
The potted shrimp was interesting, but not my favorite preparation. Overnight in the refrigerator, the butter became, for lack of better terms, crumbly and waxy. This may have been due to adding more than the recipe called for, which was not enough to cover the shrimp. Another issue was that the little flecks of ground mace darkened in the refrigerator overnight, which looked alarming since I wasn’t prepared for what looked like ground pepper to appear. Spreading the mixture on hot toast helped with the texture, and the flavor was a nice mix of shrimp, butter, and spice. Not bad at all, though I would prefer the shrimp hot with garlic butter.
Feasting Through Time 