Hunh.
And my point is that in the US English it is indeed the name of a cooking style and it’s the name of a different ingredient in Italian , so I still don’t know where *scampi *is the name of any ingredient in English. Because if what you mean is that in your country , a menu reference to “scampi” is assumed to be shrimp prepared in that style that still doesn’t mean it’s the name of an ingredient rather than the name of the dish. A reference to “grilled scampi” or “scampi cocktail” would mean that scampi was the name of the ingredient.
What about peri peri, aka pepper pepper? :dubious:
I can’t seem to find an etymological dictionary that agrees with this. I could find that “periperi” or “pilipili” means “pepper,” but not that the stem does. Reduplication is common in many languages, such that word “fnord” means one thing, but “fnordfnord” means another. (See: “boo” vs “boo boo” in English.) Or that simply “fnord” on its own means nothing, but “fnordfnord” means something. You see the same phenomenon in words like “couscous.”
The word periperi seems to be a variant of pili-pili, which is a varient of the Arabic word pilpil, which simply means “pepper.” I can’t seem to drill down any farther to find if pil on its own means anything. Perhaps one of our resident linguistic types may know?
I don’t see any evidence that “peri” on its own means “pepper,” anymore than “cous” on its own means “pasta” (or “small grainy pasta”).
Sweet jumping Jesus, can I plead for taking off the freaking tail shells too? I detest trying to figure out a delicate way to look good while slurping and fighting to get the nugget of meat out of the little tail segment, then figuring out what to do with the now piece of trash?
Is this for a sit down meal or for grab and graze cocktail party food? Sheesh. Who wants a pile of shells hanging around, or looking like a neanderthal going after that last bit of meat?
NO, a small knife does not WORK JUST AS WELL.
Buy the god damn deveiner…available in pretty much every fishmonger for three bucks or less. Just look for the red plastic handle. They ALWAYS have red plastic handles. You slip the blade under the shell, yank up, and shell and vein go kerplunk in the sink.
My older sister worked in restaurants in the ‘60s, and gave me her very old wood-handled deveining knife. It has CHANGED my shrimp eating life. The tedious deveining job is now just zip-zip-zip shrimp-ready-to-cook!
I completely agree. North of the Mason-Dixon Line I am a prig about my ersters…raw with just a squeeze of lemon, please.
Down in Chincoteague or New Orleans where the little boogers are flabbier and have less intense flavor I cheerfully eat Oysters Rockefeller, fried oysters, oyster roast, oyster fritters, whatever. And goose them up with a personal mix of sauce.
In New Orleans they call it “oyster dope,” which adds to the charm.
What, no love for mignonette?
Peri peri is Swahili for ‘pepper pepper’
There’s definitely a ceremonial quality to it, isn’t there?
Am I the only one who finds odd the idea of shrimp cocktail as a main course?
Pretty much. Use big enough shrimp and it’s all you need. Plus cocktails, of course!
I could definitely gobble down a half-pound of steamed shrimp with cocktail sauce and call it dinner.
When I was a kid (1970s) they garnished it with chopped iceberg lettuce. I could dab forkfuls of that in the sauce and call it the green vegetable.
I was just going to say serve it with a salad and I’d be all set.
No, I’m saying it *would *be referring to the langoustine (hopefully). Most often, somethinglike this.
Well, I’ve just had it for my whole lunch, so there’s that.
As to the scampi discussion - the ‘dish’ known as scampi in the US, is it a kind of scampi/shrimp deep fried nugget? Because that’s what it is in the UK (and does normally use langoustine, not that most Brits know this).
I realise it’s different from the Italian ingredient.
Oh, and we (sometimes) put horseradish in the cocktail sauce. That or tabasco.
Nope. It’s some type of seafood, fish or chicken sautéed in either olive oil or butter, and garlic. There are of course variations- lemon juice or wine might be added. The varying proteins is why it is often called “shrimp scampi” in the US - if I remember correctly, when was young, it was simply called "scampi’ and the only kind available was made with shrimp. Deep-fried whole large shrimp is simply called “fried shrimp” , “popcorn shrimp” is deep-fried small shrimp that have had the tails removed and “shrimp nuggets” are made of shrimp paste as far as I can tell.
Here is the NYTimes version of “classic shrimp scampi” to give you an idea of what it means in the US. Basically, garlic, wine, and butter sauce with shrimp. (ETA: as doreen said, wine may be omitted, lemon juice can be added, but it’s not a deep-fried breaded shrimp dish.)
My WAG is that actual scampi, i.e. langoustines, aren’t indigenous to US waters, so Italian immigrants substituted shrimp, cooked in “scampi” style (the garlic/wine/butter/lemon preparation).
Eventually the whole “scampi” as being the original crustacean for the meal got confused with the preparation itself , and we ended up with “Shrimp Scampi”
It would be like saying “Chicken cooked like veal”, and due to linguistic difference, this ends up as “Chicken veal” eventually.
That’s pretty much what the NYTimes recipe I linked to above says, but, for some reason, now I’m getting a block on it that I have to subscribe to NY Times cooking, whether I click on it in a normal window or incognito/private window. So, for those who can’t read it, it says that “Scampi are tiny, lobster-like crustaceans with pale pink shells (also called langoustines). Italian cooks in the United States swapped shrimp for scampi, but kept both names. Thus the dish was born, along with inevitable variations.”