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Shrimp Sauce
Pour one pint of white poivrade sauce and butter sauce into a saucepan, and boil until somewhat reduced. Thicken the sauce with two ounces of lobster butter. Pick one and one-half pints of shrimps, put them into the sauce with a small quantity of lemon-juice, stir the sauce by the side of the fire for a few minutes, then serve it. (2) Make about one-half pint of butter sauce, and while it is in the saucepan mix in about one teaspoonful of anchovy essence, one tablespoonful of lemon juice, a small lump of lobster butter, and one-half saltspoonful of cayenne. Stir the sauce over the fire until the butter has dissolved, then put in one teacupful of picked shrimps. Serve the sauce while hot.
Two versions of the same idea: a butter-based sauce enriched with lobster butter and loaded with small cooked shrimp. The second is the practical one for a home kitchen, since it does not depend on having poivrade already made.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmer"Stir the sauce by the side of the fire" means off the direct heat, warm rather than bubbling. Once the lobster butter goes in, a hard boil risks splitting the sauce and leaving you with greasy pink liquid.
- What "butter sauce" means hereNot beurre blanc. In period usage it is sauce au beurre: a pale roux or velouté base loosened with water or fish stock and finished with a good quantity of butter off the heat. The recipe gives no proportions; something like a tablespoon each of butter and flour, a cup of liquid, then butter whisked in in pieces will do.
- PoivradeA brown, sharply peppery reduction built on mirepoix, vinegar and crushed peppercorns; "white poivrade" is not a standard name, and presumably means the same seasoning worked into a white stock base rather than a brown one. If you have no reason to make a pint of it, use the second version.
- Lobster butterSoftened butter pounded with lobster shells, coral and roe, then warmed and strained, or simply blitzed with the shells and pressed through a sieve. Two ounces is 4 tablespoons; the "small lump" in version two is about 1 tablespoon.
- Anchovy essenceA thin, salty commercial extract of the period. Anchovy paste from a tube works, in about half the volume, or a teaspoon of Italian colatura. Salt the sauce after it goes in, not before.
- Old measuresA saltspoonful is 1/4 teaspoon, so half of one is a scant pinch of cayenne. A teacupful of the period is usually reckoned at about 4 to 6 fluid ounces, so roughly that weight of peeled shrimp. "Picked" shrimp are cooked and shelled.
- Shrimp size and timingThe intent is small shrimp folded in whole. Use cooked salad shrimp and give them only two or three minutes in the warm sauce.
Shrimp sauce belongs to the family of shellfish butters and sauces that Carême codified, in which the shells and coral of one crustacean are used to color and flavor butter for another dish. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 from the Waldorf's kitchens, is largely a working transcription of that French repertoire for an American hotel brigade, which is why entries often appear as bare numbered variants rather than finished recipes. A sauce like this may well have gone out with boiled turbot, salmon or bass, the shellfish flavor reinforcing a lean white fish, though the book does not say so. The reliance on anchovy essence points to the English side of that hotel cooking, where bottled essences and pastes were standard seasoning by the 1890s.