Shrimp Sauce
Butter, flour, shrimp, shrimp stock, pepper, mace, salt. Those were the requisites for one of the foundational dishes of Lowcountry cooking. Originally it was served over salmon or the fillet of a white fish. (No mention of it on Carolina Gold Rice until mid-19th century.) It can hardly be said that the idea of elaborating the flavor of shrimp in a butter emulsion or a white sauce is the entire creation of our region. Indeed, European cookbooks have numbers of shrimp sauces predating the appearance of “Shrimp Sauce” in Carolina’s first cookbook, 1832’s CAROLINA RECEIPT BOOK. http://digital.tcl.sc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/sccookbook/id/531/rec/3
[See below.] But once shrimp sauce/shrimp dressing/shrimp gravy made its appearance, it became a fixture. There were a multitude of tweaks, but it should be noted that from the first, that the single most effective flavor boosting technique was part of the formula—making a shrimp stock from shrimp heads and fried shells. Sarah Rutledge pulverizes some of the shrimp meats to add to her gravy, desiring an intense pink color to the sauce. In the last quarter of the century the shells too were reduced to an intense pink slurry and added to sauce/gravy, borrowing from the French bisque makers. In the 20th century cheaters used red bell peppers to boost the color.
During the early 19th century an English condiment company—Dinsmore’s of London—made both shrimp sauce (an extract of shrimp that Lea and Perrins would eventually take over) and a fermented shrimp paste—potted shrimp—probably an imperial recipe from the east. Dinsmore’s sauces, while greatly popular in the world at large, did not have much following in the South. The idea of making a shrimp gravy by dousing a white sauce with Dinsmore’s shrimp extract struck cooks as contrived. Yet this is the method found in many of the high end American cookbooks of the latter decades of the 19th century.
Shrimp sauce has several traditional applications, #1 being as an adornment to steamed Carolina Gold Rice. It has been used as the adjunct to shrimp in shrimp and grits, though some people use a sausage gravy. Shrimp sauce on a biscuit is a classic breakfast dish. A Gullah tweak is to pair it with fried mullet or broiled shark steak. One of the more evocative employments was to nap grilled discs of salted eggplant/guinea squash with it. But that shrimp sauce had more that one shake of cayenne in it.
Picture: Doc Bill Thomas’s Shrimp Sauce on Sapelo Island