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Buttered Shrimps

A quick shrimp dish cooked in butter, flour, tomato sauce, paprika, salt, onion juice, and served with buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,633 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Buttered Shrimps

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and stir until bubbling hot.

  3. Mix in the tomato sauce, paprika, salt, and onion juice; boil for one minute.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the shrimps and stir the mixture over a brisk fire for four minutes.

  2. Serve with thin slices of buttered brown bread.

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. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  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. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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
Melted fat that carries flavour and gives the sauce a rich, smooth body.
Flour
Thickens the butter and liquids into a light sauce that clings to the shrimp.
Tomato sauce
Adds acidity and savoury depth, colouring the sauce and balancing the richness of the butter.
Shrimps
Provide the main protein and mild sweetness, cooking quickly in the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce for one minute before adding the shrimp. Flour thickens only when it has been heated long enough to bubble, so the sauce needs a full minute of boiling to cook out the raw floury taste and reach its proper thickness before the delicate shrimp go in.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, sauce, onion, shrimp):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sauce, onion, shrimp. 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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