Morecambe Bay Potted Shrimp

The smell is what gets you. Butter, warmed gently with a blade of mace and a thread of cayenne, and then a handful of brown shrimp stirred through it. It smells of the coast. Not the breezy, postcard coast, but the working one: salt flats, wet sand, nets drying in the wind. Morecambe Bay in a ramekin.

Potted shrimp is one of those dishes that makes you wonder why anyone ever felt the need to complicate food. Brown shrimp, butter, spice. That's it. The shrimp are tiny, barely the length of your thumbnail, sweet and briny and nothing like the bland, waterlogged prawns that pass for shellfish in most supermarkets. They've been potted this way on the Lancashire coast for two hundred years, and the method hasn't changed because it doesn't need to.

I make these when a good fishmonger has brown shrimp in, which isn't as often as I'd like. When they appear, I buy more than I need and spend a quiet half hour potting them into ramekins. The butter sets. The fridge does the rest. Two days later, you turn one out onto hot toast and the whole thing collapses slowly, the butter softening in the warmth, the shrimp tumbling free, that gentle heat of cayenne catching you just behind the teeth. A wedge of lemon. A glass of something cold and dry.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago: shrimp, butter, mace, Tuesday. It's the kind of thing that doesn't need embellishing. There are few better feelings than putting one of these little pots in front of someone who has never had potted shrimp before and watching them work out what they've been missing.