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Feicassee of Shrimp

A tomato-based shrimp stew with onion, butter, and flour, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,065 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Feicassee of Shrimp

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Stew the tomatoes, water, and onion together until the tomatoes can be passed through a sieve.

  2. Strain the mixture and return it to the pot.

  3. Add salt, pepper, and the butter creamed with flour.

  4. Cook for 15 minutes.

  5. Add the washed shrimp and heat thoroughly.

Serve

  1. Serve with rice.

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. Tomato + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the main body and tangy flavor of the stew once cooked down and strained.
Butter and flour
Creamed together, they thicken the strained tomato liquid into a smoother, richer stew.
Shrimp
Supply the seafood protein, cooking gently in the hot stew until just opaque.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour. Flour must be fully blended with the butter before it goes into the liquid; otherwise it clumps instead of thickening the stew evenly.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, pepper, butter, flour, shrimp, rice. 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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