On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 15:12:59 +1100, Richard Wright
> wrote:
>That's a proper 'cocktail' recipe, certainly. I made a mistake when I
>typed". . . in the USA until 1939". Should have been 1937, the date of
>the OED citation.
>
>No details of the recipe given, but 'shrimp cocktail' is on a
>suggested menu in "Mrs. Allen on Cooking, Menus, Service" by Ida C.
>Baily Allen [Doubleday:New York] 1924. This is according to:
I guess any cocktails dates back to the moment they became invented
and became a fashion.
Shrimp salads was wellknown, at least in Scandinavia long time before
that.
But who invented shrimp/prawn cocktails, I don't know, neither were. I
guess though it was a natural choice when cocktails entered the scene
and someone had a lot of prawns available for a dinner:-) could be
Scandinavia since it was fished a lot here.
I doubt England since the coast was already before 1940 heavily
polluted and seafood eating traditions was quite bland. I remember my
mother talking about a dinner at an upper class restaurant in London
in the 30'ies when she studied in Oxford, getting inedible, rotten
cod. At the neighbour table sat one famous American actress who bent
over and asked if there was something wrong with the fish, and my mom
told her it was simply rotten. They got something else to eat. (The
cook didn't know any difference btw. fresh and rotten fish since all
fish at that time at least was many days old when served in London,
with almost no cooling. Just like here in Norway in valley districts
where the writer Kjell Aukrust living as a child at Alvdal in
Østerdalen, quite a distance from the coast, lively describes how fish
was transported in an uncooled wheelchair with a horse slowly walking
in warm summer sun with stinking, rottening fish uncovered on the
chair, half covered by clouds of flies who had a really good time. It
seemed like the fish my mother got served at that time in London, had
had the same treatment.
In Schønberg-Erken there is no mentions of any cocktails, so I guess
the name for such dishes was not invented in 1933 when my copy was
printed (8th revision I think). But there are tiny dishes with shrimps
that resembles and in the salad recipe part there is a shrimp salad
where you had to make your own mayonnaise (false)
1 l shrimps, 60 g butter, 40 g wheat flour, 1 dl boullon (meat !!
strange), 4 egg yolks, 1/4 tsp salt, 1 knife edge pepper, 1 tablespoon
vinegar, 3 tablespoon oil, lobster color, 1 head of salad, 1
tablespoon finely chopped parsley.
Rinse shrimps and mix with 1/3 of following sauce:
Melt butter, stirin flour, thin slowly with bouillon under heating,
after short boiling take off heat and cool. Add egg yolk together with
salt (to be dropped if shrimps are very salty), pepper, vinegar and
oil. Mix thouroughly until smooth.
Serve in shells or on a vase covered by finely chopped salad leaves.
1/3 of sauce is colored by lobster color, in the last third, finely
chopped parsley is added.
Sauces is layered in stripes over the shrimps.
I guess the distance here is quite short to varying this dish with
other sauces like Worschtershiresauce (which point to England) and
using cocktail glasses.
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