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Shrimps on Toast

Shrimps on Toast is a savory dish of cooked shrimp in a buttery sauce served over toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Shrimps on Toast

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the shrimp

  1. Clean the shrimps.

  2. Cook the shrimps in 2 tablespoons of butter for 3 minutes.

  3. Add salt, cayenne, and lemon juice, then cook for 1 more minute.

  4. Remove the shrimps.

Make the sauce

  1. In the same pan, add the remaining butter, flour, and cream, and wait until the mixture thickens.

  2. Add the egg yolks, shrimps, and sherry wine.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over buttered toast.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Shrimp + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,931 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

Shrimps
Provide the main protein and flavor of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping cook the shrimp and enrich the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cream mixture into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, forming the body of the sauce.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help thicken and enrich the sauce.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Wait until the mixture thickens. Flour thickens cream as it heats, but the sauce must be given time to reach a thick consistency before the egg yolks are added. Adding yolks too early or to a sauce that is too hot can scramble them, leaving a grainy texture.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shrimp, butter, flour, cream, pepper, egg, sherry):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Vanillafits less well
  4. Plumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against shrimp, butter, flour, cream, pepper, egg, sherry. 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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