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Tomatoes and Shrimps
Lay on a dish some sliced tomatoes, taking out the seeds, and sprinkle them over with picked shrimps. Then pour over all a good mayonnaise sauce. For the sauce: Take the yolk of an egg and mix it with two soup-spoonfuls of salad oil that you must pass in very gently and very little at a time. Melt a good pinch of salt in a teaspoonful of vinegar (tarragon vinegar, if you have it); add pepper and a small quantity of made mustard. In making this sauce be sure to stir it always the same way. It will take about half-an-hour to make it properly.
A cold assembly that stands or falls on the mayonnaise, which the original builds by hand in the old slow way. Two small points of translation and one of technique will carry it.
- The shrimpsBelgian recipes of this date mean crevettes grises, the tiny North Sea grey shrimp, cooked and hand-peeled, sweet and firm. Cooked cold-water shrimp of the smallest grade are the nearest substitute; large tiger prawns chopped down are not the same thing.
- Soup-spoonfulRead it as a tablespoon, roughly 15 ml. Two of them to one yolk gives only a scant quarter-cup of sauce, enough to dress a single plate of tomatoes.
- How much oil a yolk will takeOne yolk will comfortably emulsify 3/4 cup of oil if you want a larger batch. Add the first tablespoon literally drop by drop; once the emulsion has caught you can pour in a thin steady stream.
- Half an hour of stirringThat timing belongs to a fork and a soup plate. A whisk, or a bowl and immersion blender, does the same job in two or three minutes with no loss of quality.
- Stirring always the same wayTraditional advice with no basis in the chemistry. Direction has no effect on the emulsion; the rate at which the oil goes in is what matters.
- Made mustardPrepared mustard from the jar, as opposed to dry mustard powder. A smooth Dijon suits the tarragon vinegar. Note that the seasoning goes in dissolved in the vinegar, which helps the salt disperse.
- If it splitsStart a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken sauce into it a little at a time. A teaspoon of warm water whisked in will also often bring a stiff, oily sauce back together.
- Raw eggThe sauce is never heated. Use a very fresh egg, or a pasteurised one, keep the finished dish cold, and eat it the same day.
- The tomatoesSeeding matters here, as the original says, because the jelly and juice thin the mayonnaise on the plate. Salt the slices, drain them ten minutes and pat dry before dressing. The recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest a first course for one or two.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs Brian Luck and published in 1915, gathering dishes from Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion of 1914 — its recipes seem to have come from displaced households rather than from a professional kitchen, which is why the instructions read like someone talking rather than writing. Tomatoes with shrimps is still a fixture of Belgian menus as tomates crevettes, a hollowed tomato heaped with grey shrimp and mayonnaise, sold in brasseries from Ostend inland. The shrimp themselves, Crangon crangon, are trawled in the shallows off the Flemish coast, and are traditionally caught in that stretch by fishermen on horseback at Oostduinkerke, a practice still kept up. That the sauce is made from a single yolk and two spoonfuls of oil, by hand, over half an hour, says something about the scale of a modest household table in 1915.