Skip to main content
Main

To Pot Shrimps

Boiled shrimp seasoned with pepper, coarse sea salt, mace, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

To Pot Shrimps

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the shrimps and remove the skins.

  2. Pound the shrimps in a marble mortar.

  3. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, pounded mace, and cloves.

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. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Shrimp + peppertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,692 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylethanol (rose, floral).

  5. Shrimp + clovetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together591 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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
Form the main body of the dish, pounded into a soft, spreadable mass.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour to the shrimp.
Cloves
Add a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the shrimp.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shrimp, pepper, clove. 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.

More boiled shrimp recipes

and Prawns 3 See all 15 →

You might also like

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