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Shrimp
Take 1 pint white sauce and add to it 1 cupful of chopped shrimp, 1 tablespoonful lemon juice, a dash of paprika, and a drop or two of Tabasco.
This is a creamed shrimp — a sauce recipe more than a dish, written for cooks who already had a white sauce in their repertoire and a serving vehicle in mind. Everything depends on the sauce and on not overcooking the shrimp.
- The white sauceA pint is 2 cups. For a sauce of pouring-but-clinging consistency, use 4 tablespoons butter, 4 tablespoons flour and 2 cups milk, cooked out for two or three minutes before the milk goes in so it does not taste of raw flour. Season it properly with salt before the shrimp arrive, since the shrimp add little.
- The shrimp are already cookedThe recipe assumes cooked shrimp: canned shrimp were widely available, and shrimp boiled and picked at home were also used. Fold them into the hot sauce and heat through for a minute or two only. Shrimp held at a simmer turn tight and cottony.
- QuantityA cupful of chopped shrimp is roughly 6 oz of cooked meat, which will take appreciably more than that in raw shell-on shrimp once shells and cooking loss are accounted for. Chop coarsely; a fine mince disappears into the sauce.
- Add the lemon last, off the heatAcid stirred into a hot milk sauce and then boiled can make it grainy. Take the pan off the burner, stir in the tablespoon of juice, and serve.
- Paprika and TabascoThe paprika of this period was generally mild and used largely for colour; sweet Hungarian paprika is the closest match, not smoked. The recipe's drop or two of Tabasco is genuinely all that is wanted — the heat should be undetectable as heat.
- Yield and servingEnough for four as a light course. The recipe names no serving vehicle; mixtures of this kind were commonly served on buttered toast points, in puff-pastry patty shells or timbale cases, or in ramekins with buttered crumbs on top under a hot broiler.
Recipes like this one belong to the great age of the white sauce, when a competent American cook was expected to keep béchamel in her head and treat it as a base for whatever protein was to hand — shrimp, chopped chicken, hard eggs, dried beef. Shrimp reached inland kitchens largely in cans; commercial shrimp canning had grown up along the Gulf coast in the later nineteenth century. Tabasco sauce had been made commercially in Louisiana since the late 1860s, and paprika with a dash of Tabasco is a seasoning pair that turns up repeatedly in American cooking of this kind.