Shrimp Salad
Use either cooked or canned shrimps. If canned shrimps are used, remove from can, wash and chill thoroughly in ice water. Add an equal portion of celery or cucumber; if cucumber, serve in cucumber boats on lettuce. Remove the pulp from the cucumbers with a scoop spoon and with the shrimps marinate. Add a tablespoon of mayonnaise just before serving.
A sketch rather than a formula, in the style of most salad entries of the period: the cook is trusted to judge quantity and seasoning. Two points do need translating — what "marinate" meant in 1911, and how much dressing is actually intended.
- "Marinate" means dress with vinaigretteIn turn-of-the-century American cookbooks, to marinate a salad ingredient is to let it stand in French dressing — oil, vinegar, salt, pepper — before the mayonnaise goes on. It is not a long soak, and it is not the mayonnaise itself. Skipping it leaves the shrimp bland under the dressing.
- A tablespoon of mayonnaise is per servingA tablespoon of mayonnaise is probably per plate -- The recipe gives no quantities, but a single tablespoon added "just before serving" reads as a per-portion measure rather than a dressing for a whole bowl. Dressed in advance the salad weeps and the celery goes limp.
- Canned shrimp then and nowCanned shrimp of the period were packed in brine and were often criticised for a metallic or off edge — which may be why Estes specifies the wash and the ice bath, still worth doing with today's cans. Time in ice water firms the texture and pulls out the packing liquid. Drain very well or the mayonnaise will slacken.
- If cooking your ownShell-on shrimp in salted water need two to three minutes, until just opaque and curled into a loose C. A tight O means overcooked. Chill them fast in ice water to stop the carryover, then pat dry.
- Cucumber boatsHalve seedless or small garden cucumbers lengthwise and hollow them with a melon baller, leaving a shell about a quarter inch thick. Salt the shells lightly, invert on a rack for fifteen minutes and blot — otherwise they release water onto the lettuce. The scooped pulp gets chopped and marinated with the shrimp, so nothing is wasted.
- DeveiningEstes says nothing about it. With large modern shrimp, split the back and lift the dark tract out; it can carry grit, and it is noticeable in a cold salad.
- ServingCold throughout — plates, shrimp, cucumber. This works as a luncheon or supper salad; one cucumber half or a lettuce cup per person is a reasonable portion.
Good Things to Eat (1911) was written by Rufus Estes, born enslaved in Tennessee in 1857, who cooked in Chicago restaurants and then for the Pullman Company, serving private railroad cars, before taking charge of the executive dining rooms of a Chicago steel company. It is generally recognized as one of the first cookbooks published by an African American author, and the salad chapter reads like a working chef's shorthand rather than a domestic manual — assumptions left unstated because the reader is assumed to know them. The recipe also marks a moment in American food history: canned shrimp from the Gulf coast canneries had become cheap and widely distributed by the 1900s, putting a coastal luxury on inland tables, while the ice water rinse Estes specifies is a quiet acknowledgment of how those early packs actually tasted. Mayonnaise-bound shellfish salads served in a hollowed vegetable or a lettuce cup were the fashionable light course of the era, the same impulse that produced shrimp in avocado halves a generation later.