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SHRIMP SAUCE (another way)
Take half a pint of shrimps, picked and washed very clean, and place them in a stewpan with a spoonful of anchovy sauce, and half a pint of melted butter. Simmer for five minutes, and squeeze in half a lemon. Probable cost of shrimps, 2d. to 4d. per pint.
A Victorian fish sauce that depends entirely on knowing what "melted butter" meant in a British kitchen of the period. Read that point first.
- "Melted butter" is a flour sauceIn nineteenth-century English cookery books this is a thickened white sauce — roughly 1 oz butter cooked with 1 oz flour, then let down with about half a pint of water or fish stock and simmered until smooth. Plain melted butter will split and leave you with greasy shrimps in a puddle.
- QuantitiesHalf a pint of picked shrimps is roughly a cup, perhaps 4 oz shelled weight. Half a pint of sauce is about one cup (a British pint is 20 fl oz, so a shade more if you are being strict). Enough to dress fish for about four.
- The shrimpsThese would be small brown or pink shrimps, sold already boiled and picked. Anything already cooked wants no more than a minute or two in the hot sauce; the five-minute simmer suits raw shrimp only, and even then small ones toughen fast. Warm them through and take the pan off the heat.
- Anchovy sauceA bottled thin condiment, closest today to anchovy essence. Half a teaspoon of anchovy paste, or two or three brine-packed fillets mashed to nothing, gives the same savoury lift. Add it to the sauce base, not to the finished pan, so it dissolves.
- Lemon at the endAcid added to a hot flour-thickened sauce can make it look thin or grainy if it then boils. Squeeze the lemon in off the heat and swirl.
- SeasoningThe original gives none, on the assumption that the anchovy carries the salt. Taste before serving; a little cayenne is a period-typical addition, and some recipes of the period add a scrape of nutmeg or mace to melted butter.
- ServingThis is a sauce for boiled or baked white fish — turbot, cod, brill, sole. Spoon it over rather than serving it round, so the shrimps sit on the fish.
Shrimp sauce belongs to the family of English "melted butter" sauces that dominated British fish cookery from the eighteenth century until well into the twentieth: a flour-and-butter base flavoured with whatever came to hand — parsley, capers, eggs, oysters, lobster coral, shrimps. The shrimps in question were the small brown ones raked from sandy shores at Morecambe Bay, the Thames estuary and the Wash, sold boiled by the pint at prices Cassell's records as twopence to fourpence. Anchovy sauce, the bottled essence that gives this version its depth, is often said to be among the earliest commercially manufactured condiments in Britain and appears constantly in these books as a shortcut to savouriness. That Cassell's offers "another way" is characteristic of the dictionary format: the same dish is given two or three times over, so a cook could work from whichever set of ingredients the larder actually held.