Alf Christophersen > writes:

> 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 Tobias Smollett's "Humphry Clinker" (an epistolary novel published
in 1771), the character Matthew Bramble complains of much the same
thing upon a visit to London (letter of June 8):

"Of the fish I need say nothing in this hot weather, but that it comes
sixty, seventy, fourscore, and a hundred miles by land-carriage; a
circumstance sufficient without any comment, to turn a Dutchman's
stomach, even if his nose was not saluted in every alley with the
sweet flavour of _fresh_ mackarel, selling by retail - This is not the
season for oysters; nevertheless, it may not be amiss to mention, that
the right Colchester are kept in slime-pits, occasionally overflowed
by the sea; and that the green colour, so much admired by voluptuaries
of this metropolis, is occasioned by the vitriolic scum, which rises
on the surface of the stagnant and stinking water"

Indeed Bramble has little good to say about any of the food (or indeed
anything else) in London, especially when compared with home in
Gloucester.