#435 Shellfish Puffs

Here’s quite an involved recipe from the book that requires several techniques, one of which is the making of choux pastry – the one pastry I can’t seem to get right. However, I was asked to cater for a recent dinner party, and I thought this one could work very well because the theme was ‘An Alternative Christmas Dinner’. Prawn cocktail is often served as a starter at Christmas and I thought this hot shellfish starter would be a good alternative. It was more 1970s than prawn cocktail, sounding like a dish you would see crop up in Fanny Cradock book, not in a Jane Grigson tome!

It’s not for the faint-hearted though, aside from the pastry there’s a complex sauce made from the shells, so that means you need to shell your fish yourself to make this one. If you have never done this before, I recommend choosing prawns. Here goes:

First of all, make your choux pastry. Bring to a boil in a pan ¼ pint of hot water, a shy teaspoon of sugar and 2 ½ ounces of butter. Meanwhile, sieve 4 ounces of plain or strong white flour into a bowl; I went for the latter as you get better expansion, though this is not necessarily a good thing, see below.

When everything is boiling, take the pan off the heat, pop in all the flour in one go and make a dough by mixing the whole lot together using a wooden spoon. Put the pan back on the heat again and beat the dough well with your spoon. The dough will soon become waxy and will come away from the bowl. This can take a few minutes, especially if you’re out of practise when it comes to beating thick doughs, as I was.

Let the mixture cool for 5 minutes and beat in 4 eggs one by one, waiting for the previous one to become fully incorporated before adding the next one. Use an electric stand mixer for this if you can, otherwise and electric hand whisk. The dough can be used straight away or covered and cooled and used later.

Prepare some baking trays by lining them with greaseproof paper. Now it’s time to pipe the pastry – Jane gives no indication as to how many we need or what size they should be. I scooped the paste into a piping bag fitted with a large round nozzle and made mounds around 1 inch in diameter. It’s important to raise the piping bag as you dispense the dough so your paste is very domed – you get a better and larger puff that way.

If your piped pastry has little spikes, press them down with a wet finger so they don’t burn and carefully drip on the tray (don’t sprinkle water on the pastry itself though).

Jane now says to bake them for 35 minutes at 230°C which is far too long and too hot as I quickly discovered! I found they baked best at 200°C, becoming golden brown at the 20-minute mark.

Once they are good brown colour, remove them from the oven and cut a slit or make a hole in their bottom with a skewer. Tip them on their side, return them to the oven and turn the heat down to 120°C so that the steam that puffed them up can escape to create a nice crisp interior. Cool on a rack.

As always, whenever I make choux buns, they turned out all different sizes, all looking like clouds rather than perfectly domed profiteroles. However, they were hollow so good enough for me.

Choux buns can be stored in an airtight tub for a week, so you can get all of this done way before the time you want to serve the course.

For the filling, you need a pound of prawns in their shell, or a 1 ½ pound lobster, or a 1 ½ to 2 pound crab(or crabs). I went for prawns as I couldn’t get hold of crab or lobster at either of my favourite fishmongers! In retrospect it was a good thing, as prawns are much easier to shell than lobsters and crabs. My prawns were raw, so I steamed them in a saucepan containing just a few tablespoons of water. This method yielded a delicious, sweet tasting bright-pink liquid. I kept it and added it to the sauce later.

The delicious pink prawn stock

Remove the meat from whatever shellfish you are using and refrigerate it. If using large prawns, as I did, don’t forget to de-vein the blighters. If using crab or lobster don’t forget the precious brown meat and roe (if any).

Now make a sauce with the shells by adding them to around ¾ pint of thin béchamel sauce – Jane doesn’t tell us how to make one, but I heated ¾ pint of milk containing a couple of bay leaves, a blade of mace, some old ends of nutmegs and some crushed black peppercorns. I then made a roux with ½ ounce each of butter and plain flour.

Add the shells to the sauce and allow the sauce to simmer away for 15 minutes. Loads of flavour comes out of the shells, and the sauce turns a beautiful salmon pink colour. Sieve ‘energetically’, says Jane, so I strained the whole thing through a conical sieve, pushing down hard with the underside of a sturdy ladle.

As the sauce simmers, fry 4 ounces of chopped mushrooms with a chopped clove of garlic in 3 ounces of butter.

Add to the sauce: the shellfish meat, the cooked mushrooms, 2 heaped tablespoons each of grated Lancashire cheese and double cream and two egg yolks. Heat the sauce, but don’t let it boil. Season to taste with saltand pepper.

Cut the choux buns in half crosswise and spoon some of the mixture into the bottom half. Deftly replace the lids and serve straight away.

#435 Shellfish Puffs. There were quite a few techniques required in this recipe, but I must say that it was absolutely delicious! The sauce was creamy, sweet and packed-full of umami flavours. Not too sure about the choux buns though, but the kitsch 1970s brief was definitely filled. Jane also suggests filling vol-au-vents with the mixture – I think this would work better than choux pastry, being more sturdy, but equally as old-fashioned. Nevertheless, that filling was great, whatever it was served in, so it gets a 8.5/10 from me.

#299 Leg of Lamb Stuffed with Crab

For the 300^th recipe I got a few people round to mine for a little dinner party. Number 300 would hopefully be impressive and I wanted to do something for #299 that would be impressive too and this recipe certainly sounded the part. I also wanted something that dated in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, again to match receipt 300.

A recipe for a leg of lamb stuffed with ‘a forcemeat containing the meat of a crab or lobster … [with] a little grated lemon peel, and nutmeg‘, appeared in The London Art of Cookery by John Farley (1811), so it has a decent history, though this kind of food has very much fallen out favour in England. However, one particular chef gave it a breath of new life in the 1970s. A chap called Guy Mouilleron came up with the recipe that appears in English Food and therefore here in the blog, after some French chefs who were working in London were having a right good-old laugh at the English’s eating habits. “Fancy” one of them said “they even eat lamb with crab!” Chef Mouilleron thought it sounded like a good idea and conjured up a recipe. It’s funny that every British (and Irish!) person I’ve spoken to about this recipe has thought it just a bizarre as those French chefs.

There’s no need to be freaked by this combination though, says Jane, meat was often ‘piqued’ with fish all the time to give it extra flavour; the idea is not to impart a fishy flavour though, but a mysterious deliciousness. This is true as I already knew after one the great recipes from the blog – steak, kidney and oyster pudding. Meats are also cooked with anchovies a lot too, especially lamb and that cornerstone of English cuisine, the Melton Mowbray pork pie. It seems these things are being lost because of the Englishman’s squeamishness of all things fishy in general.

It is strange to me that Americans – or, at least, Houstonians – don’t really eat that much lamb and getting hold of a full, large leg of lamb with the bone in isn’t really possible in Houston’s otherwise comprehensive supermarket meat sections. However, I did manage to get hold of one very easily from the very good Pete’s Fine Meats on Richmond Avenue.

Pete’s Fine Meats, Houston TX

The recipe also calls for crab meat of course. You can boil your own (see here for instructions) or buy one preboiled. Do not, says Griggers, buy frozen meat as it had lost most of its flavour. However, here in America, where folks like seafood, it is very easy to get hold of freshly picked crab meat in supermarkets, so if you are in the USA, there is no need for you to sit and spend thirty minutes picking the meat from a crab’s carapace. God bless America for making the recipe a little easier for yours truly.

If you fancy the idea of this combination, here’s how to make it:

Start off by tunnel-boning a large leg of lamb. This is not that difficult to do – I followed the instructions here and it took just five or ten minutes to do. Use the bones to make half a pint of lamb stock (see here for recipe). Season the inside and outside of your leg.

Next, make the stuffing. You need eight to ten ounces of crab meat; either buy it fresh if you can or get hold of a crab weighing around one-and-a-half pounds. To the crab meat, mix in half a teaspoon of curry powder, a tablespoon of fresh mint and three egg yolks. Season with salt and pepper. Stuff the cavity with the crab and sew up the lamb at both ends with a stout needle and some thick thread. All this can be done in advance, of course.

Preheat your oven to 180°C (350°F). Chop equal amounts of onions and carrots, enough to cover the bottom of a roasting tin, as well as a large celery stick. Season well and place the lamb on top. Cover with a double layer of foil (if you have a self-basting tin, you can use that instead) and roast in the oven for two hours. Take the roasting tin out of the oven and place the lamb on another tin and put back in the oven to crisp up.

For the accompanying sauce, put the tin with the vegetables on the hob and bring to a simmer, cooking for five minutes. Now add the lamb stock and half a pint of dry white wine. Make sure you scrape off any of the burnt bits from the surface of the roasting tin. They are the best bits. Strain the sauce into a saucepan, skim away any fat and then stir in a quarter of a pint of double cream and a teaspoon of curry powder.

Place the meat on a large serving dish (don’t forget to take out its stitches!) and surround it by buttered noodles and pour the sauce into a sauce boat. Griggers didn’t say what vegetables to serve with it, so I served green beans, my own personal favourite lamb accompaniment.

#299 Leg of Lamb Stuffed with Crab. Well I wanted something that looked impressive and it this definitely looked the part. The meat was very good as was the minty and fresh tasting stuffing, though the sauce was a little bland. It wasn’t bad or anything, it just didn’t pack the punch that I expected it to. If I were to cook it again, I would simmer that sauce right so it became concentrated before adding the cream and curry powder. My expectations were also raised because the lamb section of the book has been so very good thus far. That said, roast lamb can never be bad in my opinion, so I give it a 7/10.

#272 Melted Butter

As our Jane quite rightly points out in English Food, many old recipe books suggest serving meat, fish and vegetables with good butter or good melted butter. This is not just high quality butter melted on the food, but a butter sauce not unlike hollandaise. The main difference being that flour is used to thicken the sauce instead of egg yolks, which makes the sauce much easier to make. In The Experienced English Housekeeper by Elizabeth Raffald, there are quite a few mentions of it, but no actual receipt. The recipe given here is from The Cook’s Guide by a certain Charles Elmé Francatelli who was briefly the chef at Buckingham Palace during the reign of Queen Victoria. Oh la-dee-da! (He left because he was disgusted with the filthiness of the kitchens.)

Anyways, the sauce seemed to be the perfect accompaniment to the poor old lobster I accidentally dismembered, then boiled. I’ll give the basic recipe and then the variations…

To make the sauce it is best to do the whole thing in a bain-marie or double boiler – i.e. a bowl over simmering water. Weigh out 9 ounces of unsalted or lightly salted butter – Griggers suggests using a good Danish butter – melt one third of it in the ban-marie with some pepper and nutmeg. Next, stir in an ounce of flour and ¼ pint of cold water, using a whisk to prevent lumpiness. Heat until the sauce is at simmering point, then turn the heat right down and leave for 20 minutes for the sauce to thicken. Now beat in the rest of the butter piece by piece using the whisk. Add any flavorings you want at this point (see below for some suggestions). Season with lemon juice and salt, plus more pepper if required. Lastly, add a tablespoon of double cream for richness.

Flavorings:

Shrimp sauce – add some brown shrimp to the sauce at the end; use fish stock instead of water if you like

Lobster and crab sauces – add the chopped flesh plus some Cayenne pepper. If the lobster was a lady lobster with roe, then pass it through a sieve into the sauce.

Anchovy sauce – add some anchovy essence.

Herb sauce – add plenty of chopped herbs to the sauce near the end of cooking. For larger herbs like sorrel and spinach, steam and chop them before adding them to the sauce.

For the sauce I made, I didn’t want to chop the lobster up, so I stirred in the brown meat (which people think is inedible because of its consistency, but it is delicious) and some chopped parsley and provided it in a jug to be poured over the lobster halves.

Check out the fancy lobster tools!

#272 Melted Butter. I really like this surprisingly light sauce and it complimented the lobster brilliantly. Plus it was much easier than a sauce hollandaise – one didn’t have to stand next it hoping it wouldn’t split. I imagine it would be good to serve with fish, potatoes and asparagus for a Sunday lunch in the summertime. A definite winner this one.

#271 How To Boil Crabs, Lobsters, Prawns and Shrimps

A woman should never been seen eating and drinking, unless it be lobster and Champagne, the only true feminine and becoming viands.

Lord Byron 1788-1824

A freshly boiled crab or lobster is the most delicious crab or lobster. Apparently. In England, this is not something that commonly happens in a typical household. Like all our meat and fish, the animals that provide us with all that delicious protein are helpfully done away with by burly men in abattoirs, boats or warehouses. We have lost touch with our food rather and find the idea of killing an animal for food ourselves distasteful. Pretending this doesn’t happen, in my opinion, is the distasteful act.

That said, I am not actually comfortable myself with killing animals, and as any previous reader of the blog will know, killing three eels was most distressing for me. Now it is the turn of some shellfish. This recipe is one that I never did back in England because I simply never saw live crabs and lobsters, prawns or shrimps in fishmongers. Houston, however, is a very different state-of-affairs. There’s live seafood in pretty much any supermarket you walk into here.

The lobster tank in Central Market, Houston

So if you stumble upon a live crab or lobster in the local fishmonger or supermarket here is what to do. Well, as you’ll find out, it maybe isn’t what you are meant to do….

The main point I wanted to get across is that boiling seafood can be humane (or at least no more or less humane than, say, killing a cow with a stun-gun). In English Food, Jane Grigson says that RSPCA guidelines suggest putting the animal in cold salted water and letting the water heat up – apparently when a certain temperature is reached, the creature expires ‘without suffering’. Guidelines have changed rather and nowadays it’s suggested that the little arthropod is popped into the freezer until it falls into a torpor. When plunged into the water, it’s dead before it has a chance to wake up. (The other method is to stab it in the top of the head using a sharp knife and a mallet.)

So, first things first, my mate Danny (who was helping me out with the cooking) got a lobster from Central Market. On the fishmonger chap fishing out the one we chose, I suddenly felt a pang of guilt, so we hurried to my freezer to get it nice and sleepy. Whilst we waited, the salt water into which it was boiled needed to be prepared. The water needs to be very salty. If you can, use sea water, if not dissolve enough sea salt so that the briny solution will bear an egg (this requires a lot of salt). Bring to the boil.

I was informed that the lobster would take 20 minutes or so to fall asleep. This was total nonsense, because 90 minutes later it was still moving around. Shit. By now we’d had a fair few glasses of wine due to the stress. A little later, the lobster seemed pretty inert, so we decided this was the time. Like, I said before, the idea of this post was to do away with some misconceptions about killing seafood in boiling water. So sure I was of this, I filmed the process, so you get a rare glimpse of me in action! Unfortunately things didn’t quite go to plan, and I may have reinforced those misconceptions. Oh dear.

Next time (if there is a next time) I’ll just throw the thing straight in!

Okay, back to the cooking. The cooking time is 15 minutes simmering for the first pound and then an additional 10 minutes for every extra pound.

For shrimp and prawns: 3 minutes for large prawns and for small shrimps, simply let the water come up to the boil again and they’ll be done.

Serve the shellfish simply, says Griggers, with brown bread, butter and lemon wedges.

#171 How to Boil Crabs, Lobsters, Prawns and Shrimps. Well that was an event! Aside from the auto-dismemberment episode, the cooking itself went very well. I split the lobster lengthways, removed the brown meat and used it to make a butter sauce (see next entry, when I write it!), and grilled the lobster with butter briefly. Delicious. 8.5/10.

#140 Crab Tart

I’ve mentioned before that a much ignored chapter in English Food is the Fish chapter (I must tell you what the chapters actually are, so you know where the seemingly random recipes fit). The fish that are in season during May and are in the book are salmon and crab. A quick phone call to Butters to help me decide which fish/crustacean to try first was required – I’ve never cooked with crab other than tinned, and salmon isn’t my favourite. We went for the crab. There’s a few crab recipes but this one seemed relatively straight-forward.

It seems the oceans were a much more plentiful place in the 1970s compared to now (though we knew that already!). The original recipe asks for a boiled crab weighing 2 pounds or one kilogram. Fat chance of that says the fishmonger, however I asked for the biggest one and it wasn’t too far off. It only cost a fiver! I was well happy there – a tiny tin of it cost about 3 quid. Bargin. In fact I noticed the fishmonger was stocked with loads of nice things at the minute…

Butters gets a crab infestation. Again

To make a crab tart, start off by making (or buying) some shortcrust pastry and lining an 8 to 9 inch flan or tart tin with it. Bake the pastry blind in a hot oven – 220°C – for 10-15 minutes. Do this by lining it with greaseproof paper or foil and pouring in some baking beans. For the final couple of minutes remove the beans so that the base can crisp and dry out a little.

Now you have to pay the boiled crab some considerable attention. It’s quite an arduous task but quite satisfyingly so. I won’t go through how to remove the meat here, but I’ll instead send you to this link to Deliaonline, which I followed and it did the job. In fact go to that website if there’s any techniques you want to reference. Once you’ve extracted as much meat as your patience will allow mix the white and brown meats together and season well with sea salt, black or white pepper and Cayenne pepper. Stir in one whole egg and two egg yolks (keep the whites) and 8 fluid ounces of whipping cream. Now add a tablespoon each of Cheddar and Parmesan cheese and stir in. Whisk the two egg whites until firm of peak and fold it into the crab mixture. Pour the whole thing into the case and bake at 220°C for 5 minutes and then turn the heat down to 190°C and bake for a further 25-40 minutes. The tart is ready when it has set and lost its eggy wobbliness.

Not the most photogenic of tarts, I know, but tasted lovely.

Griggers says to serve straight away with brown bread and butter, but to be extra-seasonal, I made a quick salad from rocket, sliced radishes, olive oil, lemon juice and salt and pepper. It went very well.

#140 Crab Tart 7/10. I really enjoyed cooking with and then eating crab. The brown meat dissolved into the cream and eggs making it deliciously sweet and moist and the white meat gave the whole thing good texture. The genius of the dish was the whisked egg whites, which lifted to so well. A definite success that really made me feel Spring is finally here! Great stuff.