Home › Appetizers › Cocktails with Shrimps
Cocktails with Shrimps
1. Shrimps may be put in glasses of cracked ice and each one dipped in mayonnaise. They may be served on glass plates. 2. Shrimps may be mashed in mayonnaise, put in green-pepper shells, garnished with red pepper and served with brown bread and butter.
Two serving suggestions rather than a worked recipe: the book assumes you can cook or open shrimp and make mayonnaise, and tells you only how to present them. A few of the terms have shifted.
- "Cocktail" here means a first courseIn this period a cocktail at table was a small, cold, sharply dressed appetizer served in a stemmed glass — shrimp, oyster, crab, or fruit. No alcohol is implied, and none belongs in either version.
- The shrimpHousehold books of this date often meant small canned or barrel-packed shrimp, already cooked and quite salty, though fresh-boiled shrimp were also used. Modern cooked, peeled small shrimp are the direct equivalent; rinse and pat dry so the mayonnaise does not slacken. Allow about 4 oz per person, roughly 1 1/2 lb for six.
- Cracked ice is structural, not decorativeThe glass is packed with crushed ice and the shrimp arranged over it, so they stay cold and firm through a long-served course. Chill the glasses first, and set them out no more than about fifteen minutes ahead or the ice waters down the dressing.
- "Dipped in mayonnaise"The wording may mean each shrimp is dipped before arranging, or that mayonnaise is offered alongside for dipping; the text does not settle it. Loosen the mayonnaise with a little lemon juice so it clings rather than clumps; a thick homemade emulsion is stiffer than jarred.
- Raw-egg mayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise was always made with raw yolks and eaten uncooked. If serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise.
- "Red pepper" for garnishIn American books of this era red pepper usually means cayenne, though sweet paprika was also becoming common as a colour garnish; which is meant here cannot be settled from the text. If cayenne, only the lightest dusting over pale shrimp.
- Green-pepper shellsCut a green bell pepper across into rings or halve it lengthwise, remove seeds and ribs, and drain it upside down. Blanching for a minute and shocking in ice water takes off the raw edge without collapsing the shell. Fill just before serving.
- Brown breadProbably not Boston brown bread but plain wholemeal or graham bread, sliced thin, buttered, and cut into fingers or triangles with the crusts off — a common cold-course accompaniment of the period.
The Butterick books were published by the pattern company as part of a wider domestic-advice business aimed at middle-class households running without much staff. The seafood cocktail is generally traced to late nineteenth-century American restaurant practice, where oysters served on cracked ice in a stemmed glass with a sharp dressing became a fashionable opener; shrimp, cheaper and available canned from the Gulf fisheries by the later nineteenth century, followed the oyster into the same glass. What is notable is that neither of these versions uses the tomato-and-horseradish sauce now inseparable from shrimp cocktail — mayonnaise was the older dressing here, and the ketchup-based cocktail sauce came to dominate over the following decades. The instructions are as much about the glassware and the glass plates as the food, which is the point: this is a course whose whole purpose was to look cold, small and deliberate at the start of a meal.