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Buttered Shrimps

A sauce of butter, flour, and stock simmered with shrimps, served over buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Buttered Shrimps

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Mix the flour smoothly with the melted butter.

  3. Gradually add the stock, stirring until the sauce thickens.

  4. Add the shrimps and let them simmer for 1-2 minutes without boiling.

Serve

  1. Toast a round of bread and butter it well.

  2. Pour the shrimp preparation over the toast and serve hot.

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

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

  2. Butter + shrimptop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,931 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Bread + shrimptop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together360 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

  5. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and gives it a rich flavour.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter and stock into a smooth sauce.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce.
Shrimps
Provide the main flavour and protein of the dish.

The step that matters

Add the shrimps and simmer without boiling. Shrimp turns tough and rubbery when overcooked, and a sauce that boils can break or become grainy. Keeping it at a gentle simmer for only 1-2 minutes cooks the shrimp through while keeping it 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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