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Shrimp Sauce for Fish

A sauce for fish made with shrimp, butter, anchovy liquor, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Shrimp Sauce for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the shrimp

  1. Boil live shrimps in salted water for three minutes.

  2. Pick, wash, and drain the shrimps dry.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, combine fresh butter, water, anchovy liquor, lemon juice, Cayenne pepper, and flour to achieve a thick consistency.

  2. Heat the mixture over a fire until boiling, then skim off any foam.

  3. Add the shrimps and let them simmer for five minutes.

  4. Alternatively, boil the shrimp shells in a little water for ten minutes, then strain the liquid into the butter for better flavor.

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. Shrimp + anchovytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

  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 + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Live shrimps
Provide the main flavour and the shellfish body of the sauce.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter mixture so the sauce reaches a thick consistency.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and seafood flavours.

The step that matters

Skimming the foam while the mixture boils. Foam rising from the boiling mixture contains impurities that can cloud the sauce and taint its flavour, so it should be skimmed off before the shrimp are added.

“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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