Shrimp, Roman Style
This Shrimp dish is based on a combination of ingredients traditionally used to cook tripe in and around Rome. It’s a simple tomato sauce spiked with the powerful flavors of browned garlic, chiles, and mint. When you make it with tripe, it must cook a long time for the tripe to become tender; when you use shrimp, the dish is practically done as soon as the shrimp are added.
Recipe information
Yield
makes 4 servings
Ingredients
Preparation
Step 1
Put the olive oil in a large, deep skillet over medium heat. Add the garlic and chiles. When the garlic begins to color, cook carefully until it browns just a bit. Turn the heat off for a minute to avoid spattering, then add the tomatoes.
Step 2
Turn the heat to medium-high and bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium and simmer, stirring occasionally. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Step 3
Add the shrimp and cook, stirring occasionally, until all are pink, 5 to 10 minutes. Taste and adjust the seasoning; the sauce should be quite strong. Stir in the mint and serve.
Step 4
VARIATIONS
Shrimp, Roman Style, with Pasta
Step 5
This consistency makes the dish ideal as a topping for pasta: just cut the amount of shrimp to about a pound—with a pound of pasta as the base, there’s no need for more than that. Start the water for the pasta when you start the sauce and begin to cook the pasta at the same time as the shrimp.
Squid or Scallops, Roman Style
Step 6
The same procedure can be followed to make this dish using squid, which should be cooked just until tender, probably even less time than the shrimp, or scallops, which will take about the same time as shrimp.
Shrimp
Step 7
Almost all shrimp are frozen before sale. So unless you’re in a hurry, you might as well buy them frozen and defrost them yourself; this will guarantee you that they are defrosted just before you cook them, therefore retaining peak quality.
Step 8
There are no universal standards for shrimp size; large and medium don’t mean much. Therefore, it pays to learn to judge shrimp size by the number per pound, as retailers do. Shrimp labeled 16/20, for example, contain sixteen to twenty per pound; those labeled U-20 require fewer (under) twenty to make a pound. Shrimp from fifteen to about thirty per pound usually give the best combination of flavor, ease (peeling tiny shrimp is a nuisance), and value (really big shrimp usually cost more than $15 a pound).
Step 9
On deveining: I don’t. You can, if you like, but it’s a thankless task, and there isn’t one person in a hundred who could blind-taste the difference between shrimp that have and have not been deveined.
