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Buttered Shrimps
Shell some shrimps and place them in a fryingpan with a lump of butter, a small quantity of salt and pepper, and stir them over the fire until hot. Fry some thin slices of bread in butter, drain when a golden brown and place them on a hot dish; pile the buttered shrimps on the bread and serve.
A two-minute dish that lives or dies on not overcooking the shrimp. Oscar assumes shrimp already boiled and peeled, a habit worth keeping.
- Start with cooked shrimp"Shell some shrimps" in 1896 meant shrimp already boiled in salted water, sold shelled or nearly so. If you begin with raw shrimp, cook them just until opaque, then treat the butter stage as reheating rather than cooking.
- The hinge: heat, do not cookShrimp turn tight and rubbery within a minute of overheating. Melt the butter over medium heat, add the shrimp, toss for 60 to 90 seconds until glossy and warm through, and take the pan off the fire.
- "A lump of butter"Roughly 2 tablespoons for a pound of shelled shrimp. Keep the heat low enough that the butter foams but does not brown, or the milk solids will color the shrimp.
- Frying the breadThin slices, as the recipe says, in a generous film of butter over medium heat, turning once. Drain briefly on paper so the toast stays crisp under the shrimp rather than going soft.
- Quantities and yieldThe original gives none. A pound of shelled shrimp and four slices of bread serves four as a first course or two at lunch.
- Worth addingA squeeze of lemon and a little chopped parsley off the heat are in keeping with the period and lift the butter.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is associated with the Waldorf, and many of its entries are this brief: the reader was assumed to know the technique and to need only the assembly. Buttered shrimps on fried bread belongs to the family of savory toasts (with anchovy toast, mushrooms on toast, and creamed oysters) that appeared on breakfast, supper and after-theatre menus in the 1890s.