Shrimp Sauce
Make some English sauce, using for water the liquor in which the shrimps have boiled. Then throw in the shrimps without stint. It is not uncommon to add essence of anchovies; but this overpowers the delicate shrimp flavour.
Kettner assumes you already know how to make "English sauce" and that shrimps arrive whole, in their cooking liquor. Both assumptions need filling in.
- "English sauce" means melted butterIn Victorian usage the plain flour-thickened butter sauce, made in varying proportions (commonly something like an ounce each of butter and flour to half a pint of liquid, cooked out and finished with more butter). Made here with shrimp liquor in place of water, it comes out as a light shellfish sauce.
- The hinge is the shrimp liquorEverything the sauce tastes of comes from the water the shrimps boiled in, so keep it and reduce it a little before use if it is weak. If you are working from cooked peeled shrimp with no liquor, simmer the shells and heads in water for 10 minutes and strain — otherwise the sauce is only buttered flour.
- Which shrimpHe most likely means the small brown or pink shrimp, peeled, of the kind sold potted in England. Larger warm-water shrimp will work but are better cut into pieces than left whole, or the sauce becomes a stew.
- "Without stint"No quantity is given because the point is generosity. For half a pint of sauce, 4 to 6 oz of peeled shrimp is a fair reading; less than that and the dish is not what he is describing.
- Add the shrimp off the heatThey are already cooked. Stir them into the finished sauce and let them warm through for a minute or two at most; held at a simmer they turn tough and squeaky and give up their liquid into the sauce.
- Anchovy essenceThe Victorian bottled essence he warns against was a concentrated anchovy preparation, nearest today's anchovy paste. His objection stands; a few grains of cayenne or a scrape of mace is a common modern addition that does not mask the shrimp.
- Yield and servingHalf a pint will dress fish for about four. It goes traditionally with poached turbot, brill, salmon or plain boiled cod.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877), written by the journalist E. S. Dallas and named for Auguste Kettner's Soho restaurant, is arranged as an alphabetical dictionary of dishes with opinions attached, which is why the entry is a paragraph of judgement rather than a set of quantities. Shrimp sauce was one of the standard English fish sauces of the century, alongside lobster, oyster and egg sauce, all of them variations on melted butter with something rich stirred in; the shrimp in question would have been the small brown shrimp of the Thames estuary and the Lancashire coast, boiled at the point of landing and sold already cooked. Dallas's complaint about anchovy essence is characteristic of the book and of its moment: bottled essences and commercial ketchups were cheap and everywhere by the 1870s, and the more ambitious cookery writers spent a good deal of ink arguing that they flattened everything they touched.