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Shrimps and Boiled Rice
Make thick white sauce of one heaping tablespoonful of flour, one ounce of butter and one-half pint of milk; flavor it sparingly with mace, cayenne and salt. Stir into the sauce one pint of shelled shrimps; when they are thoroughly hot, pour them on to a hot dish, arrange around them a border of boiled rice and serve.
A plain creamed shrimp, the sort of dish Oscar's kitchen turned out by the dozen for lunch service. Everything depends on how briefly the shrimp sit in the sauce.
- The hinge: heat, do not cookThe shrimp go into finished sauce only to warm through — a minute or two over low heat. Held longer they tighten, weep water into the sauce and turn cottony.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. With 1 ounce (2 tablespoons) butter and a heaping tablespoon of flour, the roux is butter-heavy and the result will be looser than a modern thick béchamel. For a sauce that coats, increase the flour to about 2 tablespoons — equal in volume to the butter, though rather less in weight.
- A pint of shelled shrimpsMeasured by volume, not weight: roughly 10-12 ounces of small peeled shrimp. The recipe assumes them ready to use, which in 1896 could mean boiled and picked shrimp or the canned and brined Gulf shrimp then on the market. If you use raw shrimp, poach them separately and briefly, then fold them in.
- MaceThe dried outer coat of nutmeg, milder and more floral. Ground mace is still sold; a scant 1/4 teaspoon is enough for a cup of sauce. Nutmeg can stand in, used with a lighter hand.
- "Sparingly" with cayenneTake that literally — a pinch. The seasoning is meant to sit under the shrimp, not announce itself, and cayenne blooms as the sauce stands.
- The rice borderPeriod cookbooks commonly boiled rice in abundant salted water, drained it and dried it briefly in a low oven or over the pot's heat so the grains stayed separate enough to bank up around the shrimp. About 1 cup of raw long-grain rice serves this quantity.
- YieldServes two generously, three as a light course. Both the sauce and the rice want to go out hot on a warmed dish; the sauce sets and skins quickly.
Oscar Tschirky — Oscar of the Waldorf, the hotel's celebrated mâitre d'hôtel rather than its chef — published his Cook Book in 1896, and it records the everyday range of a large American hotel kitchen alongside its showpieces. Creamed shellfish on or within a border of rice was a fixture of that repertoire, a cousin of the lobster Newburg and the curried shrimps that appear elsewhere in books of the period; the rice border did the work a modern plate does, holding a loose sauce in place. Canned and barreled shrimp from Gulf Coast packers were reaching Northern markets by this date, which may be part of why a recipe like this can assume a pint of them already shelled and treat cooking them as no part of the job.