Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Shrimp Salad
Shrimp Salad
Take one quart of boiled and skinned shrimps, lay them in a deep dish, seasoning with one pinch of salt, one-half pinch of pepper and one tablespoonful of vinegar and adding a few branches of celery, also chopped up. Mix well together, then transfer it to a salad-bowl and pour over one-half breakfast cupful of mayonnaise dressing; decorate with two hard-boiled eggs, cut into quarters six leaves of lettuce, twelve stoned olives and one tablespoonful of capers. The salad is then ready for use.
A plain composed salad of the sort a hotel kitchen could assemble in a minute from the cold larder. The only real work is not overcooking the shrimp and not drowning them in dressing.
- A quart of shrimpThis book measures the shrimp by volume rather than weight. A quart of cooked, peeled shrimp is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb picked meat, which starts from about 2 lb shell-on raw shrimp.
- "Skinned"Means shelled — peel and remove the tail, and pull the dark intestinal vein while you are at it.
- Cooking the shrimpThe recipe assumes the shrimp are already boiled and gives no timing. Two to three minutes in well-salted simmering water until they just turn opaque, then straight into ice water, keeps them from turning to rubber in a cold salad.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is a large cup, about 8 to 10 fl oz; half of one is roughly 1/2 cup of mayonnaise. Add it in stages — the shrimp should be coated, not swimming.
- PinchesThe book never defines a pinch; take it as somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 teaspoon of salt here and half that of pepper. Season at the end as well, once the mayonnaise is on, since dressing mutes salt.
- Branches of celeryRibs from the head, not whole stalks. Three or four inner ribs, finely chopped, is about right; the pale heart has the crispness this salad depends on.
- The vinegar restThe recipe seasons the shrimp with salt, pepper and vinegar before the mayonnaise goes on. A short rest before dressing lets the acid season the shrimp, where mayonnaise alone will only coat them.
- MayonnaiseMayonnaise of this period was made with raw yolks. Commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurized egg and is the sensible choice for a salad that will sit out on a buffet.
- YieldServes six as a first course, four as a lunch dish. Assemble the garnish — eggs, lettuce, olives, capers — only at the moment of serving.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and then the Waldorf-Astoria, through the years when the composed cold salad became the signature of American hotel cookery — the same kitchen and the same idea that produced the Waldorf salad itself. Shrimp salad of this kind was built to be assembled in quantity from cold components and to look deliberate on the plate: the quartered eggs, the olives and the ring of lettuce are arrangement rather than flavor. The measurements tell you as much about the period as the ingredients do. A cook working from this book was expected to know what a pinch and a breakfast cupful meant, and to know that shrimp were bought and reckoned by the quart.