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Shrimps, Creole
Heat in a saucepan a tablespoon oil, add one finely minced green pepper and one small minced white onion; lightly brown for ten minutes, stirring once in a while. Mix in one teaspoon flour, adding two peeled crushed red tomatoes and a half bean crushed garlic. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Mix a little, add twenty-four fresh-cooked shrimps with half gill tomato sauce and a tablespoon sherry; mix again, then slowly cook for fifteen minutes. Pour into a hot, deep dish and serve.
A compact Creole sauce that comes together in under half an hour. The one thing worth changing is the order: the shrimp go in last, not first.
- The hinge: cooked shrimp, fifteen minutesThe shrimp are already cooked when they enter the pan, and another quarter hour of simmering turns them to rubber. Build and reduce the sauce for the full fifteen minutes, then fold the shrimp in and give them two or three minutes to heat through.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon — assertive but correct for this sauce.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of tomato sauce is a quarter cup, about 60 ml.
- A half bean of garlic"Bean" here means clove. Half a clove is a light hand by present-day standards; a full clove, minced, suits many modern palates.
- Two peeled crushed red tomatoesRoughly 3/4 to 1 cup of pulp. Out of season, drained canned whole tomatoes crushed by hand give a better result than pale fresh ones.
- The flourOne teaspoon is not a roux in the Louisiana sense — it is a light binder to keep the sauce from breaking. Cook it in the oil and vegetables for a minute before the tomatoes go in so it loses its raw taste.
- Twenty-four shrimpsAt period sizes this is roughly 3/4 to 1 lb peeled, which serves two generously or three as part of a larger meal.
- Heat level"Lightly brown for ten minutes" means medium-low; the pepper and onion should soften and take a little colour, not scorch. The finished sauce should barely bubble.
Creole cooking in New Orleans grew out of French technique applied to Spanish, West African and Caribbean ingredients, and the trinity of onion, green pepper and celery — here reduced to two of the three — is its signature aromatic base. Shrimp were abundant and cheap along the Gulf, and dishes of this kind appear in American cookbooks from the late nineteenth century onward as regional American cooking began to be collected and catalogued alongside French and Italian material. The sherry and the spoonful of tomato sauce suggest a cook working from a stocked station rather than a home kitchen, though the recipe itself says nothing about its setting.