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Creamed Shrimps with Eggs

A creamy shrimp dish served with sliced hard‑cooked eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Creamed Shrimps with Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove shrimp from the can and wash them. If they are large, break them into smaller pieces.

  2. Place the shrimp in a saucepan with the hard-cooked eggs, cut into slices or quarters.

Make and serve

  1. Simmer the eggs for 20 minutes before cutting.

  2. Make a white sauce using the recipe provided in this book and combine it with the shrimp and egg mixture.

  3. 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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Shrimp + buttertop 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

Shrimp
Provides the main protein and a mild seafood flavor that defines the dish.
Hard cooked eggs
Adds body, richness and a soft texture to the creamed mixture.
Butter
Fat that carries flavor and helps form the base of the white sauce.
Flour
Starch that thickens the milk into a smooth, coating white sauce.
Sweet milk
Liquid that becomes the creamy body of the white sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening the white sauce. Flour must be cooked into the butter and the milk added gradually while stirring. Starch granules swell and thicken when heated in liquid, so adding milk too fast or skipping stirring can leave lumps or a thin sauce.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shrimp, egg, butter, milk, flour. 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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