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Shrimp Cocktails
Allow one-fourth cup shrimps broken in pieces for each Cocktail. Season with two tablespoons each tomato catsup, Sherry wine, one tablespoon lemon juice, a few drops Tobasco Sauce, one-fourth teaspoon finely chopped chives and salt to taste. Serve thoroughly chilled in Cocktail glasses.
A one-paragraph formula from an era when shrimp came out of a can and cocktail sauce was built at the table. The proportions need a second look before you scale them.
- The sauce quantities are almost certainly not per glassThe sauce quantities may not be per glass -- two tablespoons each of catsup and Sherry plus a tablespoon of lemon juice is a lot of liquid for a quarter cup of shrimp. The text reads as written for a single cocktail, but if it seems soupy, cut the seasonings and taste.
- Start with cooked shrimpThe recipe applies no heat at any stage, so raw shrimp are not an option. Use cooked, peeled, deveined shrimp; canned shrimp or shrimp boiled in salted water would both suit the instruction.
- "Broken in pieces"Canned shrimp of the period were small and soft, so breaking them up made sense. With modern shrimp, halve or roughly chop 21/25 count so the pieces sit on a spoon rather than hanging over the rim of the glass.
- Catsup then and nowCommercial tomato catsup of the period was generally thinner, sharper and less sugary than today's ketchup. Modern ketchup makes the sauce noticeably sweeter; the lemon juice and Tabasco are what pull it back.
- SherryUse a dry fino or amontillado. Cream Sherry, or the salted "cooking sherry" sold near the vinegar, will tip the sauce sweet and flat.
- Tobasco"Tobasco" -- a common period misspelling of Tabasco. A few drops is literal: the sauce should carry heat at the back, not announce it.
- Chilling is the techniqueMix the sauce, chill it and the shrimp separately, and combine just before serving. Chill the glasses too. Sauce mixed and held on the shrimp for hours goes watery as the shrimp weep.
- Yield and serviceA quarter cup of shrimp per person; weigh or measure rather than trusting a per-pound estimate, since a pound of cooked shrimp gives well more than six quarter-cup portions. The recipe specifies only cocktail glasses; a small coupe or wine glass does the same job.
Shrimp cocktail belongs to a family of chilled first courses often associated with American restaurants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the word "cocktail" jumped from the bar to the table and attached itself to anything served small, cold and sharply seasoned in a stemmed glass; chilled oyster cocktails, however, are documented earlier still. Oysters came first, then clams, crab and shrimp, all dressed with roughly the same mixture of tomato catsup, lemon, horseradish or pepper sauce, and often a spoonful of Sherry. Its appearance in a Sunday dinner book of the 1910s says something about how quickly the restaurant idea moved into domestic menus: bottled catsup and Tabasco were on grocery shelves everywhere by then, and canned shrimp made the dish possible hundreds of miles from the Gulf.