Shrimp Sauce
Make a butter sauce and add to it two tablespoonfuls of essence of anchovy and half pint of canned shrimps. Stir well and it is ready to serve.
A three-line Victorian compound sauce that assumes you already know how to make the base. Nearly all the work is in the butter sauce; the shrimp and anchovy are stirred in at the end and must not be cooked further.
- "Butter sauce" means drawn butterIn American books of this period butter sauce is usually a thickened sauce rather than plain melted butter: typically around 2 tablespoons butter cooked with a similar amount of flour, then a cup of hot water or fish stock whisked in and simmered until it loses the raw-flour taste. Proportions vary from book to book. Finish with another lump of cold butter off the heat.
- Essence of anchovyA thin bottled anchovy extract, sold by Burgess and others, saltier and looser than modern anchovy paste. Use about 2 teaspoons of tube anchovy paste in place of the 2 tablespoons called for, or mash two oil-packed fillets, and taste before adding more.
- Do not salt the baseAnchovy essence carries a heavy salt load. Season the butter sauce lightly or not at all and correct only after the anchovy has gone in.
- Half a pint of shrimpsHalf a pint is about a cup of small picked shrimp. Canned shrimp was a common convenience item in this period; small cooked cold-water shrimp, drained and patted dry, are the closest thing now.
- The hinge: add the shrimp last, off the heatThey are already cooked. Fold them into the hot sauce and serve; held over heat they tighten, curl and go cottony, and canned shrimp in particular turn mealy.
- Rinse canned shrimpIf you do use canned, drain and rinse briefly in cold water to shed the tinny brine, or it will dominate the finished sauce.
- Yield and servingRoughly two cups once the shrimp are in. It belongs with poached or baked white fish, salmon, or boiled fowl.
- ConsistencyThe sauce should coat a spoon and no more. If it stiffens while the shrimp sit in it, loosen with a spoonful of hot stock rather than reheating hard.
Shrimp sauce and its close relative lobster sauce were standard English accompaniments to boiled or baked fish through the nineteenth century, and American compilers took them over wholesale: a flour-and-butter base, an anchovy note for depth, and shellfish folded in whole. Bottled essence of anchovy was among the early commercial flavourings to reach ordinary kitchens, and is often linked to a longer tradition of fermented fish sauces and eighteenth-century English fish catsups, though that lineage is a received story rather than a documented descent. Canned shrimp made the recipe quick, which may be why it reads so tersely here.