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Shrimp Sauce
1 teaspoon salt teaspoon pepper ½ cup butter 1/4 cup flour 1½ cups hot water ½ cup shrimps 2 egg yolks Melt butter; add flour. When well blended, add hot water, cook thirty minutes; add seasonings and pour on to the slightly beaten yolks of eggs; add shrimps broken in pieces and serve.
Sauce Suprême To White Sauce made with white stock, add one half cup of cream, two tablespoons butter, one teaspoon lemon juice. Cook twenty minutes and add one fourth cup wine.
A thick butter-and-flour sauce enriched with egg yolks and flaked shrimp, meant to be spooned over poached or baked fish. Most of the attention belongs at the end, where the yolks go in.
- The hinge: yolks off the heatThe sauce is poured onto the beaten yolks rather than the yolks being stirred into the pan, and that order matters. Once the yolks are in, do not return the sauce to a boil or it will curdle into grains; warm it gently if it needs reheating.
- Cooking timeThe long thirty-minute cooking is typical of white sauces in books of this period. With modern all-purpose flour, 10 minutes of gentle simmering is enough, though you may need to add a little more hot water as it reduces.
- ProportionsHalf a cup of butter to a quarter cup of flour is a rich, loose roux by modern standards, and 1½ cups of liquid, cooked down for half an hour and finished with yolks, gives a thick sauce. Thin it with additional hot water or fish cooking liquid if you want something pourable.
- The pepper measurementThe pepper quantity is incomplete in the original line. A quarter teaspoon of white pepper suits the amount of butter and liquid here.
- ShrimpHalf a cup is roughly 3 ounces of small cooked shrimp. The recipe assumes they are already cooked, as tinned or barrel shrimp would have been; use cooked, peeled shrimp and add them only at the end so they do not toughen.
- LiquidPlain hot water is called for, but the sauce is much better made with the strained liquid from poaching the fish it will accompany, or with a light fish stock.
- YieldAbout 1½ to 2 cups, enough to sauce four to six portions of fish.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and it surrounded its confectionery chapters with a full general cookery course. This sauce belongs to the American adaptation of French kitchen practice that dominated New England cookery schools at the turn of the century: a white roux sauce, finished with egg yolks for body and gloss, and named for whatever was stirred into it at the last moment. Shrimp sauce of this type was a conventional accompaniment to boiled or baked white fish such as cod and halibut.