A Tale of Two Shrimp Seviches

If there's a summer must-have for me, it is seviche. I've made a lot in my life (see scallop seviche here and yellowtail snapper here), but not so much lately. Here in the über-agricultural Willamette Valley, we have all the vegetables you'd ever need for a great seviche, but opportunities to buy fish that you would willingly consume raw are slim. How paradoxical that we are just barely inland of the vast Pacific Ocean!

Tequila Shrimp Seviche

In the absence of fish, there's always vegetable seviche and I've made plenty of that in my life, but I need seafood for the dish to feel authentic. What to do without sushi quality fish? I have been using cooked shrimp and it's working to the extent that some seviche is better than none, an acceptable compromise.

Recently I have made two shrimp seviches, the first a more or less traditional seviche and the second based on mango, a little more non-traditional.

The first, pictured above, contains whole shrimp, tomatoes, cucumber, celery, orange pepper, poblano pepper, red onion, red jalapeño, and cilantro, dressed with lime juice and a shot of tequila. You might think that celery is bizarre in seviche. You'd be right that it is a bit unorthodox, but a yucateco line cook was showing off his chops to me once and gave me some of his seviche containing celery. I've been hooked ever since.

The citrus needs time to work. I took the photo above about 15 minutes after assembling the seviche. It was much better the next morning after hanging out in the refrigerator and coming together.

Shrimp, Mango, and Chipotle Seviche

The second seviche contains diced shrimp, mango, sliced red onion, tomatoes, cilantro, garlic, chipotle, salt, and lime juice. The photo above shows it after sitting in the refrigerator for five hours. I truly love the flavors of mango and chipotle together: they are a pair whose sum is greater than either of the parts. In fact, we used to make mango-chipotle sorbet for an intermezzo at the restaurant.

Why no recipes?

You don't need a recipe for seviche, just the basic procedure and a few tips.

The basic idea is to gather and chop your vegetables, fruits, cilantro, and seafood. Juice enough citrus to bathe everything in, then mix all the ingredients in a non-reactive bowl. Add your favorite spice and salt to taste. Refrigerate for at least a couple of hours.

For spice, anything goes. I've had fiery snapper seviche from the Yucatan with habaneros. I have had tame scallop seviche with a sprinkling of dried chile flakes and some lemon zest. Fresh chiles, dried chiles, canned chipotles in adobo, sambal oelek, Tabasco sauce: they all work, depending on the flavors and spice level you want.

The acid in the citrus juice denatures the proteins in the seafood, yielding the firm quasi-cooked texture of seviche. Lime juice is not required: any citrus or combination works great. I love both yuzu and Seville oranges aka bitter oranges in seviche. Grapefruit is fun for a change and in a pinch, vinegar can be effective (think escabeche).

Finally, because fish is so expensive, I use a lot of vegetables and fruits to stretch the fish. A quick list of vegetables and fruits: tomato, red/white/yellow/green onion, shallot, garlic, celery, jicama, citrus segments, mango, papaya, watermelon, dragonfruit, avocado, corn, cucumber, red/green/yellow peppers, radish. The list is practically endless.

Cooking Shrimp for Salads

My favorite way of cooking shrimp, so that it is flavorful but not soggy and overcooked is by poaching it in a court-bouillon. To chefs, that's the classic French term for a broth of water, an acid (white wine, vinegar, lemon juice), and flavorings in which you poach seafood, sweetbreads, and so forth.

Shrimp in a Court-Bouillon

Into a pot large enough to hold the shrimp, put sufficient water such that the shrimp will be submerged when added. Then add a splash of white wine vinegar, 2 or 3 bay leaves, a few celery or lovage leaves, a couple parsley springs, 15-20 whole black peppercorns, and salt to taste. The bouillon should taste good to you. If it does not, adjust it. If I use white wine instead of vinegar, I usually drop in a half a lemon for acidity.

For most smaller sizes of shrimp, I like to add the raw shrimp to the boiling court-bouillon and immediately turn off the heat so that shrimp poaches gently in the hot broth. Bring the court-bouillon to a rolling boil and let it cook for 2-3 minutes to extract flavor. Then add the shrimp, turn off the flame, and check the shrimp every couple of minutes until they are just set. The shrimp will change color as they cook.

By smaller shrimp, I mean 16-20 and smaller. That is, shrimp that measure 16 to 20 (or more) per pound. For the really large prawns, it is generally necessary to keep the water at a slow simmer to cook them through. Then again, the really large prawns are probably better suited to the grill than to seviche.

Post Script: What's in a Word?

Years ago, a customer reprimanded me because on my menu, I spelled seviche with the letter S as I do in this post. He was unbudgingly certain that it is spelled ceviche with the letter C. "What about cebiche?" I asked him, having seen it spelled that way in much of South America. By the way, all three spellings are pronounced identically, because Spanish speakers pronounce the letters V and B the same.

It tickles me sometimes when people think that every word has a single absolute spelling, ignoring regionality of dialects, differences in pronunciation, differing systems of transliteration, and just plain old spelling preferences among countries. Think flavor and flavour. If you think of spelling as our feeble attempt to record sounds on a sheet of paper, you might be more open to variant spellings.

My references for spelling are Mr. Webster and the OED and both of them preferred seviche when I was learning to spell. For consistency, I continue to spell it that way and index this blog that way.

But I am under no illusion that everyone spells it this way. For giggles, I generated a couple of Ngrams showing the frequency of use in books of the three spellings since 1950. The first chart shows the frequency in English-language books, the second in Spanish-language books. You should take this with a grain of salt: while spellings in books represent careful language as a result of editing, they are sometimes inconsistent with spellings in more casual media. And the results are limited to the set of books that Google has scanned. Click to enlarge the graphs.

Seviche/Ceviche/Cebiche Distribution in English

Seviche/Ceviche/Cebiche Distribution in Spanish

Things that I find interesting:

1. Despite Webster and the OED preferring seviche when I was a kid, the English-speaking world seems to have adopted ceviche. Now if you look up seviche in Webster's dictionary, you see that it is a variant spelling of ceviche.

2. The Spanish-speaking world prefers cebiche, but also uses ceviche.

3. In English, seviche and ceviche were running neck and neck until about 1982 when ceviche started to gradually assume the lead over the next 20 years. I learned how to spell seviche long before 1982. Cebiche never gained any traction.

Who knew?

Language is never constant, but I bet seviche is around for as long as there are citrus and seafood on this planet.