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Fricassee of Shrimp

A tomato-based shrimp stew simmered with onion, butter, and flour, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,065 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fricassee of Shrimp

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Stew the tomatoes, water, and onion together until the tomatoes can be passed through a sieve.

  2. Season the mixture highly.

  3. Add the butter creamed with a little flour.

  4. Cook for fifteen minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the washed shrimp and heat thoroughly.

  2. Serve with rice.

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 + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  5. Shrimp + ricetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,055 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-methylbutanol (malty, whiskey).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Form the main body of the sauce and provide acidity and liquid once stewed and sieved.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce slightly when creamed with butter and stirred in.
Shrimp
Provides the main protein and sweet, briny flavour, heated through in the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the butter creamed with flour. Adding the butter and flour mixture as a paste, rather than as loose lumps, helps it blend evenly into the hot sauce without clumping. Cooking it for the full fifteen minutes afterward lets the flour cook out so the sauce tastes smooth rather than pasty.

Swap the tomato

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

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

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