Heat 2 tablespoonfuls of butter; add 1 onion chopped and 2 cups of tomatoes. Let fry; then stir in 1 tablespoonful of flour; add ½ cup of water; let boil; add 1 quart of shrimps, salt, pepper and parsley. Let all cook twenty minutes. Stir in the yolk of an egg. Remove from the fire. Put some boiled rice on a platter; add the shrimps and pour over the sauce. Serve very hot.
A simple tomato-and-shrimp sauté over rice, written when shrimp were sold by volume and cooked far longer than we would now. Two things need adjusting: the shrimp timing and the egg yolk.
- Twenty minutes is too longShrimp are done in two to three minutes once the sauce is simmering — they turn opaque and curl. Build and season the tomato sauce for the full twenty minutes on its own, then add the shrimp at the very end. Cooked the original way they go tough and cottony.
- A quart of shrimpsShellfish were often measured by volume; a quart of shelled shrimp is roughly 1½ lb, or about 2 lb bought shell-on. The recipe gives no instruction to boil or peel them, so it appears to assume shrimp already cooked and shelled.
- Two cups of tomatoesTomatoes measured by the cupful in books of this period usually mean canned, which were widely available by then. A 14-15 oz can, with its juice, is a reasonable substitution; if using fresh, peel and chop about 1 lb and expect to cook the sauce down longer.
- The egg yolkIt thickens and enriches the sauce but will scramble if the pan is boiling. Take the pan off the heat, stir a spoonful or two of hot sauce into the beaten yolk first, then stir that back in. It will not reheat well afterward, so serve at once.
- Let fryMeans cook the onion and tomatoes in the butter until the liquid has largely gone and the mixture darkens slightly — five to eight minutes. Adding the flour to a wet pan gives a raw, pasty sauce.
- SeasoningWith no acid or heat specified beyond salt and pepper, the sauce is mild. A pinch of paprika (sweet or smoked) and a squeeze of lemon at the end bring it closer to what the Spanish label suggests.
- YieldServes four generously over about 3 cups of cooked rice. The recipe adds parsley with the shrimp; you may prefer to hold back half to scatter over the platter.
This is a day-by-day collection, each entry numbered and given a national label, and the geography is loose: what makes this one Spanish is chiefly the tomato-and-onion base served with rice. Calling it a fricassee is a French borrowing that by this date generally meant meat or shellfish finished in a thickened sauce, often enriched with egg yolk — the same liaison used in blanquettes and in nineteenth-century chicken fricassee. Shrimp were plentiful and cheap along the Gulf and South Atlantic coasts, and canned tomatoes made a dish like this practical inland. The long cooking time is in keeping with the period's habit of cooking shellfish thoroughly.