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Curried Shrimp
Place in a saucepan thirty-six good-sized cooked shrimp, with two tablespoons of sherry. Cover the pan and let steam on the range for five minutes. Then pour in a hot curry sauce, lightly mix and heat for two minutes, without boiling, and serve in a hot soup tureen.
A two-minute finishing dish that assumes you already have cooked shrimp and a pan of curry sauce ready. Everything here depends on restraint with the heat.
- The hinge: no boilingAlready-cooked shrimp reheated at a simmer turn tight and rubbery within a minute or two. Keep the pan below a simmer for the final two minutes, just until the sauce clings and the shrimp are warmed through.
- The curry sauce is elsewhereThe recipe assumes a separate hot curry sauce made from another page of the book; it does not say what goes into it. Sauces under that name in general cookbooks of the period are usually flour-thickened with curry powder and stock or milk. Judge the quantity by eye — enough to coat, perhaps a pint for this amount of shrimp.
- Thirty-six shrimp"Good-sized" is not defined here. If you take it as roughly two dozen to the pound, thirty-six peeled cooked shrimp come to something like 1 1/2 lb. That will serve about four as a main course over rice, or six as a first course.
- "On the range"Stovetop. The recipe gives no heat level; the covered five minutes with sherry is a brief steam to perfume the shrimp rather than a cooking step, so gentle heat and a heavy pan suit it.
- The sherryUse a dry or medium (amontillado) sherry, not the salted "cooking sherry" sold in grocery aisles. Two tablespoons will barely reduce in five minutes under a lid, so the alcohol note stays forward.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powder of this era was generally milder and leaned more on turmeric and coriander than many jars sold today. Bloom it in the fat when making the sauce rather than stirring it into liquid, or it tastes raw and dusty.
- ServingThe recipe calls for a hot soup tureen. Any warmed deep bowl does the same job; the point is that the shrimp keep their heat without sitting over a flame.
Curried shrimp of this kind belongs to the Anglo-Indian repertoire that reached American and British tables through colonial service and club and hotel kitchens, where "curry" often came to mean a flour-thickened stock or cream sauce seasoned with a pre-blended powder. By the time this book was compiled, curry powder was a familiar pantry item and curried dishes were common in the "foreign" or "made dishes" sections of general cookbooks. The sherry and the tureen suit dining-room service: shrimp already boiled and peeled, a sauce made in advance, and a final assembly quick enough to be done between courses.