A better shrimp cocktail is closer than you think

By Melissa Clark, The New York Times

The best advice for making shrimp cocktail I ever learned came from the great chef and cookbook author James Beard.

He was adamantly against it.

Not the shrimp, of course, which he adored, but rather the “overpowering red menace known as cocktail sauce,” as he wrote in his classic cookbook, “The New James Beard.”

“If you value their sweet and delicate flavor,” he said, pair your shrimp with lemon, mayonnaise or my personal favorite, a tangy rémoulade sauce.

Beard’s classic French rémoulade calls for a homemade mayonnaise spiked with loads of capers, lemon juice and parsley. I added horseradish and hot sauce for a kick, and just enough ketchup to tint the sauce pale pink without letting it cloy. The result is as creamy as it is bracing, an excellent foil to the shrimp’s sweet salinity.

Beard sorted out the sauce part for me, but to improve the shrimp I turned to another culinary g...