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Shrimp Sauce

A sauce of butter, boiled shrimp, lemon juice, Cayenne pepper, served with shrimp garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Shrimp Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the shrimps

  1. If using raw shrimps, boil them in salted water until they turn red.

  2. Cool the boiled shrimps, remove heads, and peel shells.

  3. Reserve a few whole shrimps for garnishing.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine the drawn-butter sauce and picked boiled shrimps in a saucepan.

  2. Simmer the sauce gently, avoiding a boil.

  3. Add a few drops of lemon juice and a pinch of Cayenne pepper just before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + shrimptop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,931 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Sauce + shrimptop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,423 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Shrimps
Provide the main flavour and protein, and their texture sets the body of the sauce.
Drawn-butter sauce
Supplies fat and richness, carrying the shrimp flavour and giving the sauce a smooth body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and sweet shellfish flavour.

The step that matters

Simmer the sauce gently, avoiding a boil. Butter-based sauces can separate or turn greasy when overheated, and the shrimps can toughen. Gentle heat keeps the emulsion smooth and the shellfish tender.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sauce, shrimp, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Avocadofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sauce, shrimp, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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