Take half a pound of shrimps; they should be alive; wipe them in a cloth. Melt a quarter of a pound of butter in a saucepan, let it settle and pour off the top into a pan; when very hot, add to it the shrimps, season, and fry them over a good fire from eight to ten minutes or until they become a good red color, then serve.
A two-ingredient dish that depends entirely on the size of the shrimp and the heat of the pan. Ranhofer means small whole shrimp, fried in the shell and eaten that way, which changes how you read every instruction here.
The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of the kitchen he ran at Delmonico's in New York across two spells over some three decades, and its shrimp chapter is thoroughly French in outlook: the numbered neighbours here are St. Jacques shells in the Parisian style and shrimp with mushrooms in a tomatoed béarnaise. Crevettes frites belongs to a European habit of eating the small inshore shrimp whole and crisp, the way the little grey shrimp of the Channel and North Sea coasts have long been treated — cooked and eaten entire, picked up by the tailful rather than peeled. The insistence that the shrimp be alive is the mark of a period before shrimp were routinely frozen on the boat: in the 1890s a shrimp still moving when it reached the range was a restaurant's plainest assurance of freshness.