We are in love with our Glover Gardens focaccia, and I was planning to make a loaf to serve with Sunday dinner, so I wanted a main course with enough sauce to justify some serious sopping. It seemed like a golden opportunity to leverage the Cooking the Past Forward project and pick a dish that would be a perfect complement. When I checked the growing corpus of vintage cookbooks and recipes that have been documented and analyzed, Shrimp Creole jumped out at me.
There were versions everywhere, from Gourmet’s Guide to New Orleans, first published in 1933, to 1971’s Recipes and Reminiscences of New Orleans, The Galveston Island Cookbook from 1975, Creole Feast and Louisiana Entertains, both first published in 1978, Galveston Gourmet 1982–1983, Rare Collection from 1985, and The Legends of Louisiana Cookbook from 1987.
Cooking the Past Forward is my ongoing exploration of vintage and community cookbooks, the stories and knowledge they preserve, and what they can teach us in the kitchen today. I follow the clues, ask questions, cook what calls to me and thoughtfully adapt when it makes sense, always trying to understand what mattered about the original. The goal isn’t simply to recreate the past, but to carry its best qualities forward to today’s tables in a way that reflects both the old recipes and the Glover Gardens kitchen.
For this one based on Shrimp Creole, the variations are exactly the kind of evidence I’m looking for. A family of recipes can show us the breadth of a dish: what nearly everyone agrees on, what changes from cook to cook, and what turns out to be optional even though it might have seemed essential.
Here’s my version, based on studying all of them and then trusting my own instincts about what would work at our table. It passed every test: The Grill-Meister approved, I was downright proud of it, and the focaccia-sopping situation was over-the-top perfect. Read on after the recipe for the backstory and the research that shaped it.
Glover Gardens Shrimp Creole
Ingredients
Instructions
- Combine 1 ½ tsp kosher salt, ¾ tsp finely ground black pepper, ½ tsp ground white pepper and ¼ tsp cayenne pepper in a small bowl.
- Place 2 lbs large raw shrimp (peeled and deveined) in a bowl. Add 1 tbsp olive oil and about a third of the seasoning mixture and toss until the shrimp are evenly coated. Set aside.
- Heat 2 tbsp peanut or canola oil in a large heavy skillet or Dutch oven over medium heat. Add 2 tbsp all-purpose flour and cook, stirring steadily, until the roux reaches a light peanut-butter color.
- Add 1 cup finely minced shallots and 1 cup finely minced celery. Cook, stirring frequently, until softened and beginning to melt into the roux.
- Add 1 cup bell peppers cut into about ½-inch squares and 4 thinly sliced green onions. Sprinkle in another third of the remaining seasoning mixture. Cook briefly, allowing the bell peppers to retain some texture and shape.
- Add ½ cup dry white wine, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Simmer briefly until the wine reduces slightly.
- Add the 1 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes, 1 14.5 oz can crushed tomatoes, 1 8 oz can tomato sauce and 1 tbsp tomato paste. Stir in 4 cloves minced garlic, 2 bay leaves, 1 tsp dried thyme and the remaining seasoning mixture.
- Add the reserved liquid from the diced tomatoes, then add a small amount of shrimp stock, chicken stock or water (if needed) so that the sauce is rich and spoonable but not overly thick.
- Bring the sauce to a gentle simmer. Cover and cook for about 5 minutes to allow the tomatoes, aromatics and seasonings to come together.
- Add the seasoned 2 lbs large raw shrimp. Cook just until the shrimp turn pink and are barely cooked through, about 3–5 minutes depending on their size.
- Remove the pan from the heat. Add 4 tbsp cubed cold butter, a few cubes at a time, stirring gently until the butter melts completely into the sauce and gives it a glossy finish.
- Taste and adjust the seasoning if needed. For a slightly more pepper-forward version, add up to an additional ⅛ teaspoon each black pepper, white pepper and cayenne pepper.
- Garnish with chopped fresh parsley and additional sliced green onion tops. Serve over hot cooked rice, with Tabasco and/or red pepper flakes at the table.
Notes
- Layer the peppers. Black, white and cayenne create warmth and depth without making the dish hot.
- Keep the roux light. A small peanut-butter-colored roux gives the sauce body without making it heavy.
- Don’t overcook the shrimp. Add them only after the sauce is finished and cook just until pink.
- Finish with cold butter. Stir it in off heat for a rich, glossy sauce.
- Control the heat at the table. Serve Tabasco alongside rather than making the Shrimp Creole itself particularly hot.
Tried this recipe?
Tell us how it went! →This One Was a Keeper
The first bite told us we had something. The sauce was rich and deeply tomatoey, but not heavy; the shrimp were tender and sweet; the bell peppers still had enough texture to make themselves known; and the black, white and cayenne ground peppers gave the whole thing warmth without turning it into a spicy dish. The white pepper, especially, was doing quiet but important work in the background. And then there was the butter. Stirred in at the end, it rounded everything out and gave the sauce a glossy, almost luxurious finish without making it taste buttery.
Spoonfuls of Shrimp Creole over rice were wonderful, but tearing off pieces of focaccia and dragging them through the sauce may have been the best part of the meal. We kept doing it long after we were technically full. That’s always a very good sign.
Join Me in the Kitchen
Here’s how our Shrimp Creole recipe came to life in the Glover Gardens test kitchen.
The Research
What Makes Shrimp Creole Shrimp Creole?
The broad family resemblance across the recipes was strong. Shrimp, tomatoes, onion and green bell pepper appeared again and again, usually with rice. Celery and garlic were common, while bay leaf, thyme, parsley, Worcestershire, cayenne and Tabasco wandered in and out.
What surprised me most was how many things I’d assumed were requirements that really weren’t. I went into the comparison expecting Shrimp Creole would always begin with a roux, but only some of the recipes did. Others thickened later with flour or cornstarch, and some weren’t thickened at all. The same thing happened with the famous holy trinity: onion and bell pepper were nearly universal, but celery wasn’t.
Tomatoes were similarly flexible. I found whole tomatoes, stewed tomatoes, tomato sauce, puree and paste, often in combinations. Rather than choose one, I eventually used diced tomatoes for texture, crushed tomatoes for body, tomato sauce for smoothness and a small amount of paste for concentrated depth.
Another surprise was that the old recipes were generally less spicy than I expected. Cayenne and Tabasco appeared regularly, but usually as accents. That steered me away from making a particularly hot Shrimp Creole and back toward something I learned from Paul Prudhomme: layering ground peppers. My seasoning mix uses black, white and cayenne pepper, with the white pepper adding a quiet warmth that doesn’t announce itself as heat. Tabasco and red pepper flakes can be right there on the table for anyone who wants more of a kick.
Two New Orleans Cooks, Two Very Different Shrimp Creoles
One of the richest comparisons came from Creole Feast: Fifteen Master Chefs of New Orleans (1978). It is an unusually valuable collection because it preserves recipes and first-person reflections from Black New Orleans chefs, including Leah Chase and Sherman Crayton, rather than leaving Black culinary knowledge largely unnamed, as happens in some of the vintage cookbooks I’ve been studying. For Cooking the Past Forward, it’s especially important because it lets the cooks speak for themselves about their methods, careers and the traditions they inherited.
Chef Chase, of Dooky Chase’s Restaurant, built her Shrimp Creole on a golden-brown roux, with onion, garlic, green pepper, celery, tomato sauce, water and cayenne. She had an extraordinary legacy as a chef, restaurateur, civil rights activist, champion of New Orleans and passionate supporter of African American art, much of which she and her husband displayed at Dooky Chase’s. I made my first visit to the restaurant last month as part of my research for Cooking the Past Forward, and wow, it was everything I imagined it would be. But that’s a story for another day.
Chef Crayton also had a renowned career, starting at the famed (and still open) Arnaud’s in 1936 as a dishwasher and pot washer, where he learned by watching the cooks. He later worked at the Court of Two Sisters, and by 1963 had begun a long tenure as chef at the Vieux Carré Restaurant. In his interview in Creole Feast, he talks about sautéing as an important part of New Orleans cooking and about Creole food knowledge held by Black cooks and passed down from their grandparents. That’s important primary-source material, especially since Black culinary knowledge and contributions are often not visible in the vintage cookbooks I’m studying.
Back to the Shrimp Creole recipe: Crayton’s version has no roux at all. His uses butter, shrimp, bell pepper, onion, celery, whole tomatoes, thyme, bay leaf and garlic.
The fact that chefs Crayton and Chase produced two clearly recognizable but structurally different Shrimp Creoles in the same cookbook tells us something else: there wasn’t just one central formula everyone was following.
What I Carried Forward, and What I Didn’t
Once I understood the basics and the breadth of the dish from all of the recipes I looked at, developing my version became much easier. I used a roux, but only a tiny one, taking two tablespoons each of oil and flour to a light peanut-butter color. Finely minced shallots and celery went in first so they could nearly disappear into the sauce; larger pieces of bell pepper and sliced green onions went in later so they’d keep some texture and identity.
I made those choices deliberately, wanting to lean into the French influence that runs through Louisiana Creole cooking. Shallots took the place of yellow onion, dry white wine deglazed the pan and provided acidity, and the sauce was finished with cold butter stirred in off the heat. That last technique has a wonderful French name, monter au beurre, literally “to mount with butter.” It gives a sauce sheen, body and richness at the very end rather than building all of that fat in from the beginning.
The shallots weren’t simply a modern flourish or nod to French cooking, though. They appeared in vintage versions from both Gourmet’s Guide to New Orleans and the Court of Two Sisters. The white wine was my own choice. I’d considered lemon, which I generally love with almost anything, but it didn’t feel right for this particular sauce. The wine gave me the brightness I wanted while keeping the flavor profile where I wanted it.
No. Rubbery. Shrimp. (Noooooo!!!)
One vintage habit I had absolutely no desire to preserve was cooking the shrimp for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes or more, as several of the recipes did.
There’s no excuse for rubbery shrimp to exist anywhere in this universe, so I finished the sauce first, seasoned the shrimp separately, then added them only long enough to turn pink and cook through.
The butter finish was probably my most deliberate departure. Several older versions achieve richness with substantial amounts of butter, oil, shortening or roux from the beginning. I used very little fat to build the sauce, then stirred in four tablespoons of cold butter after the shrimp were cooked and the pan was off the heat. It gave me all the lushness I wanted, right where I could actually taste it.
That may be my favorite example of what I want Cooking the Past Forward to be. The point isn’t to change an old recipe merely because it’s old. It’s to understand what those cooks were trying to accomplish, decide what still works beautifully, and sometimes use a different technique to get to the same delicious destination.
And Then There Was the Worcestershire
Several vintage versions included Worcestershire sauce, and I intended to use it. I forgot!
We tasted the finished Shrimp Creole and didn’t miss it, so out it stayed. I had also considered crispy fried shallots for the top, which would undoubtedly be delicious but turned out to be completely unnecessary. (But if I ever open a fancy restaurant, I’ll add the crispy fried shallots as a garnish and charge an extra ten dollars per plate. 😂)
What to Serve it With (Besides Our Focaccia)
Rice was the overwhelmingly standard companion across the recipes I studied. The Court of Two Sisters offered one wonderfully unexpected alternative: steamed rice or… creamed potatoes.
That’s a bit hard for me to swallow, given how rich the dish already is, so I stuck with the rice.
The Result
The finished Shrimp Creole belongs unmistakably to the family of recipes I studied without being a copy of any one member of it. There’s a roux, but just a hint of one; a trinity, but with shallots standing in for yellow onion; several forms of tomato, each doing a different job; and three kinds of ground pepper supplying warmth instead of outright heat. The shrimp stay tender, the wine brings lift, and the butter goes in at the end, where its glistening richness matters most.
It isn’t any of the Shrimp Creole dishes I studied, but it wouldn’t exist without having explored and learned from all of them first.
The individual recipes tell stories. The corpus reveals patterns. And somewhere between the two, dinner happens.
A very, very good dinner, in this case. Cooking the Past Forward is putting some remarkable meals on our table.
Postscript: big thanks to the Glover Gardens Facebook followers for helping me decide which Shrimp Creole final results photos to use!
©️ 2026, Glover Gardens
Cajun in spicy hot. Creole isn’t. New Orleans is a Creole city.