Skip to main content
Main

Shrimp Sauce

A sauce made with butter, shrimp essence, shrimp, water, flour, cayenne pepper, and anchovy essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and shrimp are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,931 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Shrimp Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Melt ½ cup of butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add 3 tablespoons of essence of shrimps.

  3. Stir in ½ pint of picked shrimps.

Thicken and season

  1. Pound ½ pint of shrimps in a mortar.

  2. Boil the pounded shrimps in ½ pint of water for 10 minutes.

  3. Strain the liquid through a fine sieve into a stewpan.

  4. Mix 2 tablespoons of butter with 1 teaspoon of flour.

  5. Add the mixture to the strained liquid.

  6. Stir over heat until just boiling.

  7. Add more water if the sauce is too thick.

  8. Season with cayenne pepper.

  9. Season with 1 teaspoon of essence of anchovies.

  10. Omit salt.

Serve

  1. Serve very hot in a boat.

  2. Garnish with a few picked shrimps.

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. Butter + shrimptop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,931 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Walnut + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Walnut + peppertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,039 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 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
Enriches the sauce and, kneaded with flour, thickens it smoothly when stirred into the liquid.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats with the butter, giving it body.
Shrimps
Provide the main shellfish flavour, released into the water by pounding and boiling.
Essence of anchovies
Adds a salty, savoury depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir over heat until just boiling. Flour thickens only when heated in liquid, so the sauce must be stirred to keep it smooth and lumps from forming. Boiling too long can thin or break the sauce.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Sesamefits better
  4. Walnutthe original

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

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes