Skip to main content
Sauce

Shrimp Sauce

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 half of the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and gradually pour in the boiling water while stirring constantly.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil and let it boil for five minutes.

  4. Add the pepper, salt, and anchovy essence.

  5. Stir in the shrimp pieces and the remaining butter bit by bit.

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
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when heated, giving the sauce body.
Shrimp
Contributes savory flavor and tender pieces to the finished sauce.
Anchovy essence
Adds a concentrated savory, salty depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the butter bit by bit at the end. Whisking cold butter into a hot sauce gradually emulsifies it, giving a glossy, stable texture; adding it all at once can leave the sauce greasy or separated.

“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