Swimpses and Rice Fats Waller

OK, I know your questions. What in the world are swimpses? And what does Fats Waller have to do with it?

Don’t blame me: Blame M.F.K. Fisher. This recipe is from her 1968 book With Bold Knife and Fork. In a chapter on the pleasures of rice, she speaks of Fats Waller singing “a slyly libidinous song about seafood,” with the lyrics “Swimpses and rice/Are very nice!” Swimpses, I learned, is New Orleans dialect for shrimp.

I’d really like to hear Fats singing that song, but Google couldn’t even find a mention of it for me. Anyone know of it?

The redoubtable Ms. Fisher goes on to say she developed this recipe after overhearing a bunch of fishermen “in a mean bar” trading recipes for swimpses while drinking boilermakers. (How often has anything like that happened to you?) She liked one recipe so much she created her own version. It’s a wickedly simple-sounding preparation, involving only shrimp, butter, paprika, sherry and rice. Not even any salt or pepper. It is indeed simple, and what it chiefly wants is butter. A heart-clogging amount of it.

For a dinner dish for two, I melted a whole stick of butter (that’s 800 calories!) in a sauté pan, threw in half a pound of shrimp and a tablespoon of Hungarian sweet paprika, stirred them over brisk heat just until the “swimpses” turned opaque, and mixed in ¼ cup of dry sherry. With only two seasonings in the whole dish, I figured the quality of the sherry is important. I used Lustau’s Papirusa Manzanilla, a delicate, fully dry variety. Manzanillas are all described as having a scent of the sea, which seemed a good choice to flavor swimpses.

As soon as the alcohol had evaporated, I poured the entire contents of the pan over two cups of cooked rice and tossed it all together.

This dish was rich beyond belief, and sinfully delicious. The rice just sucked in all the butter. The shrimp lolled in it luxuriously, all rosy from the paprika and lightly scented with the tang of the sherry. The flavors called to mind the near-stultifying New Orleans cooking we’d experienced in a couple of unforgettable meals at Galatoire’s, in the French Quarter. Now we understand how restaurant chefs achieve their extraordinary effects – boatloads of butter!  For a weekday meal at home, we couldn’t come near finishing our portions of this “slyly libidinous” dish – though it’s hard to imagine how much libido could survive all that butter: Maybe “wantonly lubricious” is a better description.

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Side dish: Green Beans sous faux vide

Knowing we’d be wanting a plain green vegetable with our swimpses and rice, I’d acquired some green beans. Normally, if they are of decent quality, for a meal like this I simply boil them. But I’d just read an online review of an unusual new book called Ideas in Food, by Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot, in which they apparently suggest boiling vegetables inside a ziplock plastic bag to achieve restaurants’ sous vide effect. The reviewer was wowed by the result when she tried it, saying her green beans “retained a bright, undissipated flavor” that she’d never encountered before. Well, I thought, since last week I found I could raise bread dough effectively in a plastic bag, why not try cooking my green beans in one? This might be the beginning of a whole new chapter of my culinary life. Here are the bagged beans, afloat in a pot of boiling water:

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I was dubious about one aspect of this technique. How can you tell when the beans are done, since you can’t easily pull one out and test it? I had to take a straining scoop and dip out the whole bag, try to unzip it without getting scalded, test a bean, re-zip the bag without getting scalded, and drop it back into the boiling water. Four times I did this, before the beans were done. They take a long time to cook this way.

Tasted at last, they were flavorful enough, but we didn’t find them so far superior to green beans cooked in open water that I’m willing to spend a fussy 45 minutes on them. So much for my new culinary life: There’s one advanced technique I can contentedly live without.

The quantity of butter in the shrimp, on the other hand, might shorten my old life dramatically, if indulged in often. Delicious as it was, this is clearly a dish to enjoy infrequently.