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Shrimps, Bordelaise
Cut into dice 1/2 can or 1 cup of shrimps, add 1 tablespoonful of chopped ham, 1 ounce flour, and 1 ounce of butter, mixed, 1 cup of stock or consomme, 1 tablespoonful of tomato sauce or mushroom ketchup, 1 slice of chopped onion, a bayleaf, and 1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley. Cook carefully until the sauce is smooth and thick, adding salt and pepper.
A small chafing-dish sauce built on a roux, thinned with stock and coloured with tomato. The whole thing takes about ten minutes, and the only real risk is boiling the shrimp into rubber.
- Add the shrimp lastThe recipe lists everything at once, but cooked or canned shrimp need only to heat through. Build and thicken the sauce first, then fold in the diced shrimp and give it two minutes off a hard boil.
- An ounce of flour, an ounce of butterAn ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; an ounce of flour is a scant 1/4 cup. "Mixed" is unexplained, but most likely means rubbed together cold into a beurre manie, whisked into the hot stock in pieces. Melting the butter and cooking the flour in it for a minute gives a cleaner sauce.
- Canned shrimpHalf a can in 1902 meant the small tinned shrimp then widely sold, drained and rinsed to shed the tinny brine. About 5 to 6 oz of cooked small shrimp, or the same weight of raw shrimp poached briefly, stands in directly.
- Mushroom ketchupNot a tomato product but a thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquor, still sold by British grocers. Worcestershire or a spoonful of mushroom soy is closer in effect than modern tomato ketchup if you take the second option.
- Onion and bayleaf"One slice of chopped onion" is roughly a tablespoon. Soften it in the butter before the flour goes in, or it will stay raw and crunchy in a sauce this brief. Fish out the bayleaf before serving.
- Salt with careHam, canned shrimp, commercial stock and mushroom ketchup are all salty. Season only at the end, after the sauce has reduced to a coating consistency.
- Yield and servingEnough for two as a light supper or four as a first course. Serve on buttered toast, in pastry shells, or over rice.
- The parsleyHold back part of the tablespoon and scatter it on at the end. Parsley cooked into a sauce this dark loses both colour and scent.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century American genre: the travel cookbook that brought home continental dishes for hostesses working with a chafing dish and a grocer's shelf of tinned goods. The name here is loose. In classical French cookery a sauce bordelaise is built on red wine, shallots and marrow or a brown reduction, named for Bordeaux and its wine; the label was often applied more loosely in Anglo-American cookbooks of the period, and this one has no wine in it at all. What it does show plainly is how thoroughly canned shrimp had entered the northern kitchen. Gulf and Atlantic shrimp were being packed in tin from the later nineteenth century, so a shellfish course could be produced in minutes from a store cupboard, which is exactly what this recipe assumes.