Home › Fish › Shrimp and Mushrooms
Shrimp and Mushrooms
Cut in small pieces, and saute in butter 1 cup of mushrooms. Heat the same amount of shrimp in 1/4 cup of cream. When the cream boils, season with salt and white pepper, a teaspoonful of Worcestershire sauce; add the sauted mushrooms. Mix well, and serve hot.
A quick chafing-dish preparation of the sort that filled American cookbooks around 1900 — a cup each of two ingredients, bound with a little cream and served at once.
- Scale and yieldOne cup of mushrooms and one cup of shrimp with a quarter cup of cream serves two as a light course, or four spooned onto toast. Doubling works, but increase the cream by less than double or the mixture goes soupy.
- The shrimp are already cooked"Heat the same amount of shrimp" assumes boiled, peeled shrimp — the tinned or market-cooked shrimp of the period. If you start from raw, cook them separately just until opaque, then follow the recipe. Either way they want no more than a minute or two in the hot cream; longer and they tighten and squeak.
- Cream that will not breakUse heavy cream, at least 36% fat. Light cream or half-and-half brought to a boil with salt and Worcestershire is liable to curdle. Bring it barely to a boil, no more.
- Cook the mushrooms dry firstSaute the mushrooms in butter over fairly high heat until the water they release has evaporated and they start to colour. If they are still weeping, that liquid will thin the cream and dull the flavour.
- White pepper is deliberateThe period preference in pale cream dishes was white pepper so no black specks showed. Black pepper will do, though it looks different and tastes rather more aromatic; white pepper has a mustier flavour of its own.
- WorcestershireA teaspoon in this quantity is assertive and does most of the seasoning work. The original adds it as the cream comes to a boil; you may prefer to add it off the heat. Taste before adding salt, since the sauce is already salty and anchovy-forward.
- ServingThe original says only "serve hot" and specifies no accompaniment; chafing-dish dishes of this kind were commonly served over buttered toast, in pastry shells, or straight from the pan. It does not hold or reheat well — the shrimp toughen.
This belongs to the chafing-dish era, roughly the 1890s through the 1910s, when a spirit lamp and a shallow pan on the sideboard let a hostess cook in front of her guests for late suppers and after-theatre snacks. The genre had a house formula: something already cooked, cream, a jolt of Worcestershire or sherry or cayenne, and no oven. Shrimp fit because canned and market-boiled shrimp were reliably available inland by then, and cultivated mushrooms had become a commercial crop in the northeastern United States in the same decades — so a dish that would once have been coastal and seasonal could be assembled anywhere from two shelf items and the cream jug. The terseness of the instructions is characteristic; compilations of this kind assumed a cook who needed proportions, not procedure.