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Shrimp Salad
1 pint cooked shrimps prawns, fresh or canned Marinade Lettuce, shredded celery, or shaved cabbage Mayonnaise or other dressing Marinate the shrimps and serve whole on lettuce, shredded celery, or finely shaved cabbage, and cover well with a mayonnaise or other dressing. Canned shrimps are excellent for salads.
A recipe of the assembly sort, where the only real technique is the marinade and the choice of shrimp. A few of the period's assumptions need spelling out.
- "Marinade" here means French dressing"Marinade" here most likely means French dressing -- an unspecified marinade for salad in books of this period is generally oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, in proportions anywhere from two to four parts oil to one of vinegar. A quarter cup or so will dress a pint of shrimp.
- Marinate brieflyThirty minutes in the refrigerator is enough. Acid continues to firm the protein, and shrimp left in dressing for hours turn chalky and dry at the centre.
- A pint of shrimpMeasured as shelled, cooked meat, a pint is about 2 cups. Reckon on something closer to 1 1/2 to 2 lb of raw shell-on shrimp to get there after peeling and cooking; two 6 oz cans, drained, will fall a little short.
- Canned shrimpThe praise is honest for the time. With a modern tin, drain, rinse under cold water, and soak 5 minutes in ice water to shed the metallic brine note before dressing.
- Cook your own, if freshSimmer shelled shrimp in salted water 2 to 3 minutes, until just opaque through, then cool at once. Anything approaching the long boils of older cookbooks gives you rubber.
- DeveiningThe recipe assumes small shrimp served whole. Larger modern shrimp should have the dark dorsal vein removed, which the original would have taken for granted or ignored.
- Shaved cabbage"Finely shaved" means sliced as thin as you can manage with a knife or mandoline, not grated. Salt it lightly and let it drain 10 minutes if you want it to stay crisp under dressing.
- YieldA pint of shrimp will serve about four as a first course or light lunch.
The New Delineator Recipes came out of The Delineator, the Butterick pattern company's magazine, whose food pages were aimed at cooks running a household without much hired help. That context explains both the shape of this recipe and its closing endorsement of canned shrimp: Gulf Coast canneries had been shipping shrimp inland since the later nineteenth century, and for inland households the tin was often the most reliable way to get shrimp at all. A magazine kitchen recommending it was reassuring readers that the convenience product would not embarrass them. The looseness of the instructions is also of its period; recipes of this kind were written as reminders for cooks assumed to know already how to make a French dressing and a mayonnaise, so those are named rather than given.