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Creamed Shrimps in Fontage Cups
Substitute two cups shrimps broken in small pieces for lobster meat, and follow rule for Creamed Lobster,
A one-line variation that assumes you have both the Creamed Lobster rule and a fontage iron to hand. Neither is a given now, so the working details are worth spelling out.
- What a fontage cup isA thin, crisp shell of fried batter, made by heating a fontage (timbale or rosette) iron in deep fat, dipping it into a thin egg-and-milk batter so a skin clings to the outside, then returning it to the fat until the shell slips free. They are not pastry and not baked; the modern equivalent is a rosette iron, and store-bought filo or puff-pastry cases will stand in.
- The hinge: fill at the last minuteFontage cups collapse into softness within minutes of meeting a hot sauce. Fry them ahead, drain on paper, hold them uncovered at room temperature, and spoon the creamed shrimp in as the plates go out.
- Two cups of shrimpsThat is cooked, peeled shrimp, roughly 10 to 12 oz by weight, cut into pieces about the size of a thumbnail so they suspend in the sauce rather than sinking. Canned shrimp were widely sold by 1907 and may well be what was meant; fresh shrimp today should be barely cooked before they go in.
- Do not cook the shrimp twiceThe lobster rule assumes meat that is already cooked and only needs heating. Shrimp turn rubbery in a couple of minutes of simmering, so fold them into the finished sauce off the heat and warm through gently.
- The creamed baseThe Creamed Lobster rule is not given here. White sauces of the Boston school of the period run to roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk or thin cream, cooked until it coats a spoon and seasoned with salt and a little cayenne or paprika; sherry or lemon may or may not appear in Lowney's version.
- Seasoning for shrimp rather than lobsterShrimp is milder and slightly sweeter than lobster and takes more assertive seasoning. Lemon juice, a grating of nutmeg or a little dry mustard keep the sauce from tasting flat.
- YieldTwo cups of shrimp in about a cup of sauce should fill roughly six to eight fontage cups, which is six to eight entree servings in the period sense of a small course between fish and roast, or four modern lunch portions.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer whose product duly dominates the confectionery chapters while the rest of the book follows the Boston Cooking School manner of the day: white sauce, exact measure, and a chain of recipes built by cross-reference so that one rule can serve a dozen dishes. Creamed shellfish in a crisp case was a standard genteel entree of the era, a way of stretching a small quantity of expensive protein into individual servings that looked considered. The fontage iron, a shaped metal form on a long handle dipped in batter and fried, is closely related to the rosette iron and was sold for this sort of dish; it fell out of general use once puff-pastry shells and, later, commercially made vol-au-vent cases became easy to buy. That shrimp could substitute so casually for lobster is consistent with the growth of Gulf coast shrimp canning, which by 1900 was sending tinned shrimp inland far more cheaply than live lobster could be had.