Shrimp Cocktail Shooters

Don't overcook shrimp - they continue cooking after removal from water. The ice bath is crucial for stopping cooking and achieving the right snap. Homemade sauce beats store-bought every time.

The shrimp cocktail has one of the most specifically documented origin stories in American food history. Wikipedia confirms that seafood cocktails originated in 19th-century San Francisco Bay Area saloons during the California Gold Rush, where miners drank raw oysters from glasses spiked with vinegar, ketchup, horseradish, and Worcestershire sauce. An 1889 article in the Chicago Tribune reprinted a New York Sun account of a man from San Francisco demonstrating an oyster cocktail at the celebrated Delmonico's steakhouse in Manhattan, and cocktail sauce recipes combining ketchup, horseradish, and Tabasco were already documented on the West Coast as early as the 1860s–1880s. As oyster populations dwindled from overharvesting, shrimp replaced them as the shellfish of choice. In 1919, Victor Hirtzler's Hotel St. Francis Cook Book established the first standardised printed version of the cocktail sauce recipe. Shrimp cocktail gained a new wave of popularity in the 1920s during Prohibition, when bars repurposed their idle cocktail glasses as serving vessels for seafood. The format was reinvented again at the end of the 1950s in Las Vegas: the Golden Gate Casino on Fremont Street sold shrimp cocktails at 99 cents each, moving as many as 2,000 per day and making the dish synonymous with the city's affordable glamour. Wikipedia records it as the most popular hors d'oeuvre in both the United States and Great Britain from the mid-1960s through the late 1980s — a reign of nearly thirty years. In 1991, the Golden Gate Casino celebrated the sale of its 25 millionth shrimp cocktail. The shooter format brings this century-long American classic into a single bite.