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Shrimp Butter
Pick and shell one pound of shrimps, place them in a mortar to pound, add one-half pound of butter, and when well mixed pass the whole through a fine sieve. The butter is then ready for use.
A compound butter of the classic kind: pounded shellfish worked into butter, then forced through a sieve so nothing but smooth, pink-tinted fat remains. The whole thing hinges on the shrimp being cooked before they go into the mortar.
- Cooked shrimp, not raw"Pick and shell" most likely assumes shrimp already boiled, as they were commonly sold and prepared at the time; the recipe itself does not say. Raw shrimp pounded into butter will not keep and will taste flat, so poach them two to three minutes until just opaque, then cool before pounding.
- ProportionsOne pound of shrimp in the shell yields roughly 8-10 oz of picked meat, so the ratio here is close to equal weights of shrimp and butter. That is a strongly flavoured butter; halving the shrimp gives something milder and easier to spread.
- Mortar or food processorA processor does the work in under a minute, but it heats the butter. Start with butter at cool room temperature, pulse rather than run, and stop as soon as it is uniform.
- The sieve is not optionalShrimp shells and tail fragments survive pounding, and the fibrous flesh stays stringy. Pushing the mixture through a fine sieve or tamis with a rubber spatula or the back of a ladle is what makes this a butter rather than a paste. Chill it slightly if it goes soupy while you work.
- SeasoningOscar gives none. A pinch of salt, cayenne and a few drops of lemon are usual; add them before sieving so they distribute.
- Yield and keepingAbout two cups, allowing for a little lost in the sieve. Roll in parchment and refrigerate up to three days, or freeze in a log for three months. Because it contains cooked shellfish it does not keep like plain butter.
- How it was usedWhisked in off the heat to finish shellfish sauces and bisques, and spread for canapés. It must not boil once added to a sauce or the butter breaks and the flavour goes muddy. Do not let it boil once added to a sauce.
Compound shellfish butters — beurre de crevettes, lobster butter, crayfish butter — were standing preparations in French professional kitchens by the late nineteenth century, made partly to extract flavour and colour from shells and trimmings that would otherwise be wasted, and partly because a spoonful of one finished a sauce faster than anything else in the larder. Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, and his 1896 book records the building blocks of the kitchen alongside the finished dishes, which is why an entry this brief sits among the recipes: it is a component, expected to reappear in bisques, in the seasoning of shellfish, and on the cold canapés that a hotel of that scale turned out by the hundred.