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Sauce

Shrimp Sauce

A sauce made by boiling shrimp skins, straining, melting butter, adding shrimp and anchovy essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Anchovy and shrimp 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

  1. Boil the shrimp skins in ½ pint of water.

  2. Strain the water.

  3. Melt some butter in the strained water.

  4. Add the shrimps and 1 teaspoon of essence of anchovy.

  5. Let it boil briefly.

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. Anchovy + shrimptop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

  2. Butter + shrimptop 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
Provide the main shrimp flavour and the body of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Essence of anchovy
Adds a salty, savoury depth that rounds out the shrimp flavour.

The step that matters

Let it boil briefly. Shrimp turns tough and rubbery when overcooked, so a brief boil is enough to heat the sauce and keep the shrimp tender.

“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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