Skip to main content
Sauce

Shrimp Sauce

A sauce made from boiled shrimp, melted butter, and anchovy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Shrimp and anchovy work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 440 recipes. Both carry hexanol, which smells green, fruity. The science ↓

Shrimp Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pick the shrimps and boil the skins in ½ cup of water for 15 minutes.

  2. Strain the water and add it, along with the shrimp flesh, to ½ pint of melted butter.

  3. Simmer for a few minutes and add a little anchovy to taste.

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. Shrimp + anchovytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

  2. Shrimp + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,931 recipes

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

  3. Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Shrimps
Provide the main flavor and tender, lightly firming flesh to the sauce.
Melted butter
Carries flavor and gives the sauce richness and a smooth, silky texture.
Anchovy
Adds a salty, savory depth that rounds out the shrimp flavor.

The step that matters

Simmer for a few minutes after adding the shrimp flesh. Shrimp flesh cooks quickly and becomes tough and rubbery if overheated, so keep the simmer brief and gentle.

“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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes