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Creole Shrimp Stew

A shrimp stew cooked with lard, flour, onion, parsley, thyme, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Creole Shrimp Stew

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat the lard in a pot.

  2. Add flour, onion, parsley, and thyme; brown together.

  3. Pour in boiling water and add the boiled shrimps.

  4. Season with salt and cook slowly for 20 minutes.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + thymetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Browns with the fat and onion and thickens the stew as it cooks.
Lard
Fat for browning the flour and onion, adding richness and flavour.
Onion
Softens and browns, adding sweetness and savoury depth to the base.
Shrimps
Main protein, providing the stew's seafood flavour and body.

The step that matters

Browning the flour with the lard and onion. Flour needs to cook in fat until it browns slightly; under-cooked flour leaves a raw, pasty taste, while over-browning can turn it bitter. Cooking it before the liquid goes in lets it thicken the stew smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, parsley, thyme, shrimp):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, parsley, thyme, shrimp. 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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