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MY
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EVERYDAY
MARCH | APRIL 2017
the
Barbecue
issue
I
f you took a poll among NewOrleanians
as to what there favorite dish is, there’d
be a variety of answers, but barbecue
shrimp would com up — a lot. That’s no
surprise — the dish is on many restaurant
menus, and with good reason. But few
would expected it to outpoll gumbo,
crawfish bisque, or charbroiled oysters and
other iconic New Orleans dishes.
A fair amount of history lies behind the
popularity of barbecue shrimp. Its ancestor
appeared during the most fecund years of
evolution for Creole and Cajun cookery,
from the last decades of the 1800s through
the first years of the 1900s. The strongest
force in those years was Italian, as large
numbers of sailors, opera singers and cooks
landed in New Orleans from Italy.
Barbecue shrimp is a variation of the classic
Italian dishes
gamberi fra diavolo
(shrimp in
the style of the devil’s brother) and shrimp
scampi.
Both of those dishes are similar to barbecue
shrimp, but the real dish and its misleading
name were unknown until the 1950s. It was
a long evolution.
More on that in a moment. But we must
now say what barbecue shrimp is — and
what it is not. Barbecue shrimp isn’t smoked
or grilled. Nor is it served with anything
even close to American barbecue sauce.
Instead, what you get are big — but not
too
big — shrimp, usually served with the
shells, heads, tails and claws still intact.They
are cooked in a sauce that is mostly butter
and black pepper.
Beyond those main elements, the recipes for
barbecue shrimp are quite varied. Among
common ingredients in the sauce are garlic,
Barbecue Shrimp
by
Tom Fitzmorris +
photo by
Romney Caruso