Wilfred Lucas
CREAMED
1 can shrimps ½ cup diced celery 1½ cups milk ½ cup celery liquor 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour ½ teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Cook the celery till tender in water to cover, drain the shrimps, and freshen in cold water. Make a white sauce of the butter, flour, seasonings, milk and celery-liquor. Add the celery-cubes and shrimps and serve on buttered toast with a garnish of celery-hearts. This makes four large or six small portions.
I always eat heartily after my evening performance and this is one of my favorite dishes.
A plain creamed-shrimp-on-toast supper, of the kind an actor could put together after the curtain. Two things need sorting before you start: the stray heading and the fractions.
- The title is a printer's errorThe title looks like a printer's error -- "Scalloped Eggplant" appears to belong to an adjacent recipe. Nothing in the ingredients or method involves eggplant; make it as creamed shrimps.
- Those 1½s are almost certainly ½sThose repeated 1½s -- The list as printed gives 1½ cup diced celery, 1½ cups milk, 1½ cup celery liquor and 1½ teaspoon salt. The run of identical figures, and the singular "cup"/"teaspoon" against the plural "cups milk", suggests some were originally ½. Reading the salt as ½ teaspoon and the celery liquor as ½ cup gives a better-balanced sauce, but this is a guess rather than a certainty -- season to taste and add the liquor gradually.
- Celery liquorSimply the water the celery was boiled in. Cook the celery in just enough water to cover so the liquid stays concentrated, and strain it before it goes into the sauce.
- Freshening canned shrimpPeriod canned shrimp came in a heavy brine and often carried a metallic edge. Draining and a rinse in cold water is still worth doing with canned shrimp; if you use cooked frozen shrimp instead, allow about 8 oz drained weight and cut the added salt back, tasting at the end.
- Sauce consistencyThree tablespoons each of butter and flour to two cups of liquid gives a sauce between thin and medium: it will coat but still pour, and with the full 1½ cup celery liquor as printed it would be thinner again. Cook the roux a minute before adding liquid so it does not taste of raw flour, and add the shrimp only at the end to warm through -- a couple of minutes is plenty before they toughen.
- Celery heartsThe pale inner ribs, served raw and whole alongside as a garnish. In 1916 celery was a table vegetable in its own right, often set out in a special upright glass.
- YieldThe recipe says four large or six small portions, which holds. Toast the bread and butter it just before serving so it does not go sodden under the sauce.
This comes from Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries, a 1916 collection gathered from stage and screen people, and the closing line about eating heartily after the evening performance is the whole point of the book -- the recipes were meant to carry the personality of the contributor as much as the dish. Wilfred Lucas was a working actor of the early film years who moved between the stage and the Griffith-era studios, and his choice is a thoroughly typical supper of the period: creamed something on toast, built on a white sauce, using canned shrimp from the Gulf canneries that had made shellfish an everyday pantry item far inland. Celery appears twice here, diced into the sauce and again raw as a garnish, which reflects its standing at the time as a prized salad vegetable rather than mere background flavouring.