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Shrimp Sauce

A buttery shrimp sauce made with flour, anchovy essence, pepper, salt, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Anchovy and shrimp 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. Melt 1 cup of butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add 3 tablespoons flour and gradually pour in 4 cups boiling water while stirring constantly.

  3. Bring to a boil and let it boil for 5 minutes.

  4. Add ½ teaspoon pepper, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 tablespoons anchovy essence, and 1 cup shrimp bit by bit.

  5. Stir in the remaining 1 cup of butter until melted.

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. Anchovy + shrimptop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

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

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Pepper + anchovytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Provides fat and richness, and carries the flavour of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the boiling water into a smooth, body-giving sauce.
Shrimp
Adds the main seafood flavour and a little texture to the sauce.
Anchovy essence
Adds a salty, savoury depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and water. Flour must be stirred in and the boiling water added gradually while stirring constantly. Pouring too fast or stopping to stir lets lumps form, because flour clumps when it hits hot liquid unevenly and the starch cannot disperse.

“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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