The shrimp is found off the coast of England. It was a common food from a very early period. As a result, shrimp as a word came into the English language quite early. It appeared for the first time in a list of expenditure for King Edward II – the so-called wardrobe accounts. Without any comment, a price of 3 pence is given in a 1327 list for the item “shrimps”. It was in England that the one of the first complaints about fishing conservation was made. About twenty years later, a petition was made to Edward III (son of the above Edward II) to stop shrimp trawling because a large number of small fish were also caught in the small-meshed nets. A commission of qualified persons was formed to find out how true this statement was. It was to report so as the right thing could be done! Shrimp trawling continued. In the 1800s, there were thousands of boats round the coast of Britain alone.
The shrimp found its way its way into one of the earliest English cooking books, published in the first half of the 1400s – there the recipe stated that one should take a pike, a perch, a shrimp and then boil them together. Other words that these 15th century cook books introduced to English included such foods as haggis and sardines and such methods as grated and stewed.
Now shrimp trawling faces serious competition from shrimp farming – with the world’s biggest shrimp producers being China and Thailand, with Asia in total producing about four fifths of world supply. 2006 was the last year in which more wild shrimp were caught than farmed shrimp produced.
But the most famous dish with shrimps, the shrimp cocktail only found its way into an American cookery book in 1937.
