Home › The World's Kitchen › Devilled Shrimps
Devilled Shrimps
Shell one and a half pounds fresh-cooked shrimps, cut them in small pieces and place in a bowl; add four tablespoons bread crumbs, one-half ounce of butter, the juice of half a sound lemon, half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon French mustard, one tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, two saltspoons cayenne pepper, two beaten eggs and one gill cream. Mix well and place the whole in a baking dish, sprinkle a little bread crumbs over, then set in the oven for fifteen minutes. Remove and serve.
A late-Victorian shrimp gratin, essentially a savoury custard bound with crumbs. The original omits an oven temperature and a yield, and its pepper measure is stronger than it looks.
- The hinge: do not overbakeThe shrimp are already cooked, so the only thing the oven has to do is set the egg and cream. Fifteen minutes at 375F in a shallow dish is about right; pull it when the centre is just barely firm, since a few extra minutes turns the shrimp to erasers and weeps liquid out of the custard.
- A gillIn American usage half a cup, 4 fl oz (an imperial gill is 5). Combined with two eggs this gives a loose custard, which is why a shallow baking dish matters more than a deep one.
- Saltspoons of cayenneA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two is half a teaspoon of cayenne for a dish of this size. That is genuinely hot by modern habit. A quarter teaspoon still reads as "devilled" alongside the mustard and Worcestershire.
- Half an ounce of butterOne tablespoon. Melt it before mixing, or it will stay in lumps through the crumbs.
- French mustardDijon, or a smooth mild prepared mustard. Not the bright yellow American kind, whose turmeric and vinegar give it a different, more assertive character here.
- "A sound lemon"Period phrasing for one that is not shrivelled or mouldy; it carries no instruction beyond using fresh juice rather than bottled.
- Shrimp sizeThe wording ('Shell one and a half pounds fresh-cooked shrimps') most likely means 1.5 lb weighed in the shell, though it could be read either way; if you want 1.5 lb of shelled meat, buy proportionally more. Small shrimp suit this better than jumbo, and the recipe's instruction to cut them into small pieces is what lets the custard hold together when spooned.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives none; roughly four as a first course, two or three as a light supper. A dish of this type would suit a hot savoury or chafing-dish course, so serve it with toast points or plain bread and butter rather than as a main dish with sides.
- Browning the topFifteen minutes in a moderate oven will not colour the crumb topping much. Dot it with a little more butter and give it a minute or two under the broiler at the end if you want a browned crust.
"Devilled" is recorded in English cookery from the later eighteenth century, meaning anything made fiercely hot with cayenne and mustard, and it became a standard treatment for cooked and leftover meats, kidneys, bones and shellfish in British households. Worcestershire sauce, which dates from 1837, was later added to the devilling repertoire. Filippini's International Cook Book collects such dishes as English contributions to a world repertoire, and the format here — shellfish, crumbs, cream and egg baked briefly in a dish — belongs to the same family as the hot savoury course served at the end of a formal English dinner, or to the chafing-dish suppers that were fashionable in American cities in the 1890s and 1900s.