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Shrimp Sauce, Superior
No. 1.--Take a pint of shrimps which have been boiled in plain salt and water, without spice or flavouring of any kind. Pick them, and in doing so throw the heads and shells into one dish and the flesh into another. Boil the heads and shells gently in two table-spoonfuls of water till the flavour is extracted. Strain the liquor through a sieve, let it stand to settle, then pour it off clear, and free from sediment. Make a breakfast-cupful of melted butter; stir the liquor into it, add the shrimps, and shake the sauce over the fire for three or four minutes till the shrimps are hot and tender, but they must not boil, or they will be hard. No. 2.--Take the third of a pint of picked shrimps. Pound half of them in a mortar till smooth, and mix with them half a cupful of thick cream, sweet and fresh. Work two ounces of fresh butter and a table-spoonful of flour to a smooth paste with a wooden spoon. Add a cupful of boiling water, and stir the sauce over the fire for seven or eight minutes. Put in the unpounded shrimps, and when they are hot and tender put in the cream, and serve immediately. Time to simmer, three or four minutes. Sufficient for six or seven persons. Probable cost, shrimps, 2d. to 4d. per pint.
Two versions of the same sauce: one thin and clear, built on an extract of the shells, the other enriched with pounded shrimp and cream. Both depend on the shrimp never being allowed to boil.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn Victorian English this is the standard flour-thickened butter sauce — butter cooked with a much smaller quantity of flour (No. 2 here uses two ounces of butter to a tablespoonful), then let down with water or milk to a pouring consistency. Simply melting butter and stirring shell liquor into it will give you a broken, greasy sauce.
- The shrimps meant hereA pint of shrimps means small brown or pink shrimp sold whole and already boiled, measured by volume in the shell, not by weight. A pint yields perhaps 3 oz of picked meat. Cooked cold-water shrimp from the fishmonger are the nearest equivalent; large tiger prawns are the wrong texture and the wrong flavour entirely.
- Breakfast-cupfulAbout half a pint, so roughly 10 fl oz or 1¼ US cups of finished sauce in No. 1.
- Two tablespoonfuls of water is not a typoThe shells are simmered in a very small quantity so the extract comes out concentrated; it is a flavouring, not a stock. If you use more water you will need to reduce it back down before adding it, or the sauce will thin and taste of nothing.
- Let the liquor settleShell liquor carries fine grit and pounded fragments. Straining, standing and decanting off the clear part matters more than it sounds — sediment gives the sauce a sandy mouthfeel.
- The hinge: no boilingAlready-cooked shrimp need only to be warmed through; the book allows three or four minutes, off a hard heat. Its warning is sound: at a boil the proteins tighten and the shrimp turn rubbery and dry.
- Cream goes in last, and off the boilIn No. 2 the cream is added after the whole shrimps are hot, and the sauce is served at once. Held over heat it will thin as the starch continues to break down, and may split.
- Pounding without a mortarA small food processor or a stick blender in a narrow jug will do the work of the mortar, but stop while there is still a little texture; a completely smooth purée reads as paste rather than sauce.
- Yield and servingSix or seven portions as a sauce, which from a breakfast-cupful works out at roughly three tablespoons each. It is for poached or grilled white fish — turbot, brill, sole, cod — and traditionally goes with boiled salmon.
Shrimp sauce belongs to the great family of English butter sauces that dominated fish cookery from the eighteenth century onward: a flour-and-butter base let down with water, milk or fish liquor and flavoured with anchovy, lobster, oyster, capers or, as here, shrimp. Its economy is the point — the shells and heads, which would otherwise be thrown out, are simmered for their flavour, and the cost note of twopence to fourpence a pint reflects how cheap the small brown shrimp of the English coast then were, sold by the pint measure from barrows and shrimp stalls at seaside towns and in London. Cassell's habit of giving two numbered versions is often said to be characteristic of the big late-Victorian household dictionaries, which are generally taken to have aimed at serving both the plain kitchen and the ambitious one: No. 1 is the everyday sauce, No. 2 the version with cream and pounded shellfish, which some would read as showing the influence of French practice on English fish cookery.