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Shrimp Sauce
To Drawn Butter Sauce add one egg yolk and one-half can shrimps cleaned and cut in pieces.
A two-line variation that assumes you already have the book's Drawn Butter Sauce in the pan. Almost everything worth knowing here is in what the original leaves unsaid.
- Drawn butter sauce, in fullIn this book it is a white roux sauce made with water, not a bowl of melted butter: about 1/3 cup butter, a few tablespoons of flour, 1 1/2 cups hot water, salt and pepper, with part of the butter worked in at the end (check the book's own Drawn Butter Sauce, as the proportions differ between printings). In American usage of the period "drawn butter" generally means this cooked sauce; the British sense of clarified butter would not serve as the base here.
- The hinge: the yolk must not boilBeat the yolk with a little of the hot sauce, return it to the pan off direct heat, and take it no higher than a bare steam. Brought to a boil it curdles into threads and the sauce is finished.
- Half a can of shrimpsCans of shrimp of this era were small by modern standards, commonly in the region of 5 ounces or so drained, though sizes varied; half a can is therefore only a couple of ounces of shrimp — a modest garnish rather than a shrimp-heavy sauce. Two or three ounces of cooked small shrimp is a reasonable equivalent today.
- "Cleaned" means the veinCanned shrimp of the day were frequently packed whole with the dark intestinal vein intact, and often gritty. Rinse them, strip the vein, and cut into short pieces before adding.
- Canned shrimp tasteOlder canned shrimp often carried a metallic edge, and draining and standing them briefly in cold water, sometimes with a little lemon or vinegar, is one remedy sometimes suggested for it. Modern cooked shrimp needs no such treatment; add it at the very end and only warm it through, since a second cooking makes it tough.
- SeasoningThe base sauce is built on water rather than stock, and tastes accordingly plain. A squeeze of lemon, a grating of nutmeg or a dash of cayenne carries it, and a fish cooking liquid used in place of some of the water improves it considerably.
- Yield and servingSomething on the order of 1 1/2 cups, depending on the base recipe you use, enough for four to six servings poured over boiled or baked white fish — cod, haddock, halibut. Serve at once; it thickens and skins as it stands.
Shrimp sauce belongs to a family of nineteenth-century "made sauces" in which a plain flour-and-butter base is turned into something else by a single addition — lobster, oysters, capers, egg, parsley. Cookbooks of the period often organise their sauces exactly this way, giving one foundation recipe and then a column of one-line variations: learn the base, then vary it. That the shrimp arrive from a can is worth noticing. By the 1890s Gulf Coast canneries were shipping shrimp inland in quantity. The use of a water-based sauce rather than a stock or cream one also fits a frugal domestic register: it is the sauce a cook could make at short notice with nothing beyond the standing store cupboard.