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Potted Shrimps

A preserved shrimp dish made by packing shrimps with spices, salt, sugar, bay leaves, and olive oil, then storing in a cool, dry place.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Potted Shrimps

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spice mix

  1. Mix mace, nutmeg, cloves, salt, and sugar to your satisfaction.

Pot and bake

  1. Fill clean, dry pots with the shrimps, pressing them down well.

  2. Place the pots in a cool oven until no evaporation is observed.

  3. Remove the pots, press the shrimps down again, and add bay leaves on top.

Seal and store

  1. Cover the shrimps with olive oil and store in a cool, dry place.

  2. Replenish the oil the next day if absorbed.

  3. After three days, tie a bladder over the pots.

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. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Clove + olivetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,866 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Nutmeg + olivetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,864 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Shrimps
Form the main body of the dish, which is pressed down into the pots.
Olive oil
Covers the shrimps to exclude air, adding fat and helping preserve them.
Table salt
Seasons the shrimps and draws out moisture, helping preserve them.
Nutmeg
Adds warm, aromatic flavour to the shrimps.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour similar to nutmeg.
Cloves
Adds strong, warm aroma and flavour to the spice mix.

The step that matters

Baking the pots in a cool oven until no evaporation is observed. Gently drying out the shrimps removes excess moisture before sealing with oil. Trapped water left in the pots can spoil the shrimps during storage.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (nutmeg, clove, sugar, shrimp, olive):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against nutmeg, clove, sugar, shrimp, olive. 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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