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Creole Shrimps with Rice
1½ lb. shrimps 1 large onion, cut fine 1 large can tomatoes 1 T sugar 1 T flour 2 T butter 1 green pepper, chopped 1 C rice Salt Pepper Simmer the onion in the butter five minutes. Stir in the flour, tomatoes, green pepper and seasoning. Cook 15 minutes, add the shrimps, simmer gently 5 minutes and serve with the rice, boiled or steamed.
A straightforward tomato-and-shrimp sauce over rice, written for cooks who already knew how to boil rice and clean shrimp. Two things need translating: the measurement abbreviations and the shrimp themselves.
- AbbreviationsT is a tablespoon, C a cup. So: 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 tablespoon flour, 2 tablespoons butter, 1 cup raw rice.
- The shrimpCanned and already-cooked, peeled shrimp were widely available by this period, and that may be what was meant; the recipe does not say, and the five-minute simmer would also serve raw shrimp. If you start with raw shell-on shrimp, buy roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb to end up with about 1 1/2 lb of meat.
- The five minutes that matterThe shrimp go in at the very end and get five minutes at a bare simmer. Raw shrimp are done in two or three; already-cooked shrimp only need to heat through. Longer and they tighten into rubber, which is the one way this dish fails.
- Canned tomatoesA 'large can' of the period was probably a No. 2 1/2 or No. 3, somewhere in the region of 28 to 32 oz. Break up the tomatoes and expect a loose, brothy sauce rather than a thick one; the single tablespoon of flour is there to bind, not to make a roux.
- The sugarNot a sweetener so much as a corrective for acidic packed tomatoes. Taste before adding all of it if your tomatoes are good.
- Green pepperAdded raw with the tomatoes, so it softens over the 15-minute cook but keeps some bite. If you want it fully sweet and collapsed, sweat it with the onion instead.
- RiceOne cup raw rice yields about three cups cooked, which suits this quantity of sauce. Start it before the sauce so it can rest covered while the shrimp finish.
- YieldServes four to six as a luncheon dish, less if it is the whole meal.
Church and club cookbooks of the early twentieth century circulated "Creole" recipes far beyond Louisiana, and the label came to mean, in Northern kitchens, almost any dish built on tomatoes, onion and green pepper. This one is a plain Midwestern reading of that formula: no roux browned past pale, no celery, no cayenne beyond the pepper shaker, and canned tomatoes standing in for fresh. Canned goods are the reason a dish like this could travel at all -- commercial canning of tomatoes and of shrimp put a Gulf Coast dish within reach of villages hundreds of miles from either coast. The pairing with boiled rice was, by then, a common accompaniment for dishes called Creole.