Tiny Shrimp, Revisited

Not too long ago, I mentioned Sau-Sea Shrimp Cocktails and making my own with "salad shrimp" I occasionally bought at local supermarket Big Y. The salad shrimp there is always, without exception, nasty. Overly salty, wet and spongy and with the texture of wool felt, Big Y's salad shrimp barely taste like anything but salt. They are disgusting little grubs, and after my last experience with them I was ready to write off salad shrimp forever.

And then it was ALDI to the rescue.

ALDI's Sea Queen brand Cooked Salad Shrimp are just about as awesome as salad shrimp can be given their size.  They're plump and tender and they taste like shrimp, not saltwater. I made a couple of fake Sau-Sea-style shrimp cocktails with the Sea Queen shrimp and they were pretty good, about the same level of pretty goodness as I remember the originals.

The difference between the two products is stunning; after trying the Sea Queen brand, it amazes me that any store would put their name and logo on something as bad as the Big Y shrimp.

But aside from flavor, texture, and general edibility, there are other differences between the two products.  Sea Queen salad shrimp come in a 12-ounce package for $3.99.  In order to get 12 ounces for that price from Big Y, you have to wait until they're holding one of their "Buy One Get Two Free" sales, during which they mark the 4-ounce package up to give you two more of them "free." The Sea Queen brand specifies that the shrimp are wild caught, tells you which waters they are caught in (in this case, Guyana and Ecuador) and where they were processed (USA.) They also note the species of shrimp and the catch method on the package. This kind of labeling is unusually transparent, and it's one of the reasons why I'm not hesitant to buy frozen seafood at ALDI: I always know where it's coming from.  Would that some other big supermarket chains do the same thing - you get nothing but a terse country of origin line on the Big Y brand.

So, if you're still game to try making your own little shrimp cocktails at home, stop by ALDI and pick up a bag of their salad shrimp while they're still featuring it. You won't be sorry.

Sau-Sea Shrimp Cocktails & Tiny shrimp

Do you remember Sau-Sea shrimp cocktail?  When I was a kid, this was one of my favorite treats;  my mother would buy them for semi-special occasions.

Sau-Sea cocktails consisted of tiny little shrimp, swimming in a bland, almost ketchupy, cocktail sauce and packed in small fluted juice glass. Each glass was sealed with a litho'd tin lid, as shown in the photo, and the glasses were reusable.  Go to a church rummage sale and you'll find a testament to Sau-Sea's onetime popularity - you'll almost always find a dozen or more of those heavy little glasses for sale (often for about a dime each.)  Up until the mid-eighties, when she finally sold off her own hoard in a tag sale, I bet you could tell how many times our family had eaten Sau-Sea shrimp cocktails by the number of old Sau-Sea tumblers lurking in my mother's kitchen.

---

When Sau-Sea first started business in the late 1940's, shrimp was a luxury food that most people almost never ate outside of a restaurant.  These days, of course, you can get really good fresh or freshly-frozen shrimp at just about any supermarket, and they're big enough to actually see with the naked eye.  Even so, sometimes I get nostalgic for Sau-Sea Shrimp Cocktail. It doesn't seem to be as ubiquitous as it once was, so I often try to make my own version.

Big Y sells small bags of what they call "salad shrimp." Like most of what Big Y sells, they're hideously overpriced - except for a few times a year when the store jacks the price up a bit and then pretends to do everyone a favor by selling it as a "Buy One, Get Two Free!" special. That's when I'll buy three bags and make my own bastardized Sau-Sea imitations.

Thanks for selling me that
bag of krill, Big Y.

I make up some cocktail sauce - not the boring Sau-Sea cocktail sauce of my sprogdom, but my own kickass version - and pack the salad shrimp into juice glasses. It's never the same.  Those salad shrimp are completely nasty. They're not tender and meaty like shrimp should be, they're soggy and wet and feel like shrimp-shaped cut-outs from a kitchen sponge when you chew them. And even though they're about as tiny as they can be and not qualify as Sea Monkeys, size doesn't really have anything to do with their crappiness - that's purely the fault of whatever cutrate company Big Y deals with.  And, of course, it's my own damn fault for buying them again. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson by now, but  no - there I am,  back at the frozen food counter, buying shitty little fingernail-clipping-sized shrimp from Pig Y. Whatever else you may think of Sau-Sea, back in the day the shrimp might have been small as hell, but they were always pretty decent and they have my respect in that regard.  Also, those glasses. Until I was like 14 years old and started chugging it right from the carton, I never had orange juice at home unless it was served in one of those repurposed Sau-Sea glasses.

---

I hardly ever find Sau-Sea shrimp cocktails in the store anymore.  When I do, I rarely buy them. They're more expensive than when I was a kid, when the Waldbaum's Food Mart in town sold them for something like $1.25 for three little jars, and those little tiny shrimp just don't seem to be such a good deal as they used to.  My perceptions of "shrimp cocktail" have changed since I was 7, I guess.  And the Sau-Sea company has changed, too.  In 1993 they  decided to become a marketing company rather than a manufacturer.  They stopped processing their own shrimp in Yonkers NY, released the 70 employees who had processed 10 tons of shrimp per day, and handed over production to a company in Virginia.

Sau-Sea newspaper advertisement, c. 1960