Shrimp Sauce
To a "drawn-butter sauce" (about one-half pint), add one pint of shrimps cut in small pieces, a pinch of cayenne pepper, and a teaspoonful Let this simmer for a few minutes serve hot. This is of anchovy sauce. nice for salmon or turbot.
The text has been scrambled by the scanner: the phrase "of anchovy sauce" belongs at the end of the sentence about the teaspoonful, and the stray period after "few minutes" should be a semicolon. Read whole, it is a compound butter sauce finished with shrimp and served over poached fish.
- Drawn butter sauceIn American books of this period it generally means butter melted with a little flour and thinned with hot water or fish stock to the consistency of thin cream, seasoned with salt; in English usage the term sometimes meant no more than melted butter. A light flour-thickened butter sauce, or a velouté made with fish stock, is a reasonable stand-in.
- Half a pint, one pintThe sauce base is one cup. The shrimp are measured by volume rather than by weight: a pint of shelled cooked shrimp is roughly 10 to 12 ounces.
- Anchovy sauceA bottled Victorian condiment of pounded anchovy, vinegar and spice, still sold in Britain but scarce elsewhere. A scant teaspoon of anchovy paste, or two mashed oil-packed fillets, gives the same salt-and-umami lift. Salt the base lightly until after it goes in.
- The shrimp are already cookedThe shrimp are probably already cooked -- Shrimp were commonly sold boiled, and often peeled, so the "few minutes" may be only to warm them through and marry the flavours. Two minutes over low heat is enough; longer and they tighten and squeak. If you start from raw shrimp, poach them separately and briefly, then fold in.
- Keep it below a boilA flour-thickened butter sauce will break or turn greasy if it gallops. Hold it at a bare tremble and take it off the heat the moment the shrimp are hot.
- TurbotRarely available outside Europe and expensive where it is. Halibut, brill or any firm white flatfish serves the same purpose, and the sauce is at its best on plain poached salmon.
- YieldAbout a pint and a half of finished sauce, enough for four to six portions of fish. Cayenne aside, it takes a squeeze of lemon well.
Drawn butter was the workhorse sauce of nineteenth-century English and American cooking, the base from which egg sauce, caper sauce, lobster sauce and this shrimp version were all built, and its ubiquity is presumably why a book like this could name it in quotation marks and assume the reader already knew. The anchovy sauce is the older layer: bottled fish condiments descend from the anchovy essences and "catchups" that eighteenth-century cooks used the way we use fish sauce, and a spoonful in a butter sauce seems to have been a common trick for giving boiled fish some depth. Pairing the sauce with salmon or turbot marks it as company food; both were prestige fish on a turn-of-the-century table, poached whole and sent up on a napkin with the sauce in a boat alongside.