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To Boil Shrimps

A boiled shrimp dish served with a butter‑flour sauce and fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

To Boil Shrimps

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the shrimp

  1. Pick out large shrimps and discard smaller ones.

  2. Boil plenty of water with salt (5 to 6 ounces per gallon).

  3. Remove scum from the boiling water.

  4. Add shrimps and cook for 4 to 5 minutes.

  5. Drain shrimps in a colander.

  6. Cool on a cloth or serve hot on a napkin.

Make the sauce

  1. Shell the shrimps and bruise the heads.

  2. Boil in 1½ pints of water for 30 minutes.

  3. Strain the liquid through a fine sieve.

  4. In a saucepan, melt butter and stir in flour, mace, cayenne, and nutmeg until browned.

  5. Gradually add the strained liquid and bring to a boil.

  6. Add the shrimps and heat through.

Serve

  1. Serve over fried bread made from the bottom crust of a loaf.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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 the flavor base of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour until browned. Cooking the flour in butter until it browns removes raw starch taste and builds nutty flavor. Browning too fast or too far can scorch it and make the sauce bitter.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

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