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Sauce

Shrimp Sauce

A sauce made from boiled shrimp skins, water, melted butter, and anchovy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Shrimp and anchovy work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 440 recipes. Both carry hexanol, which smells green, fruity. The science ↓

Shrimp Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the shrimps

  1. Pick half a pint of shrimps.

  2. Boil the skins in ½ cup of water for 15 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Strain the water and add it, along with the flesh of the shrimps, to ½ pint of melted butter.

  2. Simmer for a few minutes.

  3. Add a little anchovy.

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

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Shrimps
Gives the sauce its main seafood flavour and tender pieces of flesh.
Melted butter
Forms the rich fat base, giving the sauce a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Anchovy
Adds a salty, savoury depth that rounds out the seafood flavour.

The step that matters

Simmer for a few minutes. Shrimp flesh cooks quickly and turns firm and rubbery when heated too long, so keep the simmer brief and gentle to preserve tenderness.

“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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