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Wiggle
1/2 pint (1 cup) picked 3/4 pint (1½ cups) milk shrimps Salt and paprika to taste 2 ozs. (4 tablespoonfuls) butter 2 tablespoonfuls flour 1/2 pint (I cup) canned peas Blend the butter and flour in a saucepan over the fire, season with salt and paprika, and pour in the milk, stirring all the time. Stir until the mixture boils, then add the shrimps broken in pieces and the peas drained from their liquor.
Serve very hot with crackers or fingers of buttered toast.
A plain white sauce carrying shrimp and peas — chafing-dish food, meant to be assembled quickly and eaten hot from crackers. Two points decide whether it works: the roux and the moment the shrimp go in.
- The measuresThe recipe gives cups alongside its pints: 1 cup shrimp, 1 1/2 cups milk, 1 cup peas — equivalences that treat a pint as 2 cups. Four tablespoons butter is 2 oz, or half a stick.
- "Picked shrimps"Small cooked shrimp, shelled — the tiny cold-water sort sold cooked and peeled will do, and canned shrimp would have served equally. Either way they are already cooked, which is why they go in at the end.
- Do not cook the shrimpAdd them off the boil and heat through for a minute at most. Simmering already-cooked shrimp in hot sauce turns them tight and squeaky, and the whole dish depends on their texture.
- Blend the butter and flour properlyCook the roux a minute or two over moderate heat before the milk goes in, so the flour loses its raw taste, but do not let it colour. Add the milk in stages and whisk; all at once invites lumps.
- Canned peasPeriod canned peas were soft and sweetish. Frozen peas, thawed, are closer to what a modern cook wants and hold their shape; add them with the shrimp rather than letting them stew in the sauce.
- SeasoningThe sauce needs more salt than seems likely, and the paprika is doing real work — it is the only warmth in the dish. Sweet paprika is the likely intention.
- ConsistencyFour tablespoons butter to two of flour is a butter-heavy roux, so the sauce will be rich but loose. If it thickens past pouring consistency while you hold it, thin with a spoonful of milk.
- YieldServes two generously as a lunch or supper dish, or four as a first course over toast. It does not reheat well; the shrimp toughen.
Shrimp wiggle was a fixture of the American chafing dish craze that ran from the 1890s into the 1920s, when a spirit lamp and a copper pan let students, bachelors and hostesses cook at the table without a kitchen. The name is often said, as a folk explanation, to come from nothing more than the wobble of the creamed mixture, and the dish became closely associated with college suppers. Its two central ingredients — canned shrimp and canned peas — explain its reach: both were reliably available in tins by the 1890s, so a cook with a pint of milk and a cupboard could produce something that passed for a seafood course in any month of the year. That reliance on the can is exactly why a book of "something different" dishes could offer it as a novelty rather than a luxury.