Some French food is intimidating. This is not that. Avocat aux crevettes — literally "avocado with shrimp" — is the starter of French family lunches: the avocado half arrives at the table filled with little pink shrimp in a pale coral sauce, there is a lettuce leaf underneath doing ceremonial work, and every French person over the age of four knows exactly what it is. My husband makes it on Sundays. It takes him ten minutes and he plates it like it's being judged, which, in this house, it is.
What is avocat aux crevettes?
It's France's great retro starter — an entrée in the French sense, meaning the first course, not the main. A ripe avocado is halved, the pit comes out, and the hollow is piled with small cooked shrimp dressed in sauce cocktail. It's served cold, in the skin, usually on a leaf of lettuce. It sits in the same beloved-classic family as the cheese course — nobody calls it fashionable, everybody orders it, and it has survived every food trend since it appeared on bistro menus decades ago.
What's in the sauce? (Yes. That's ketchup.)
Sauce cocktail is mayonnaise and ketchup — roughly three parts mayo to one part ketchup — with lemon juice, a few drops of Tabasco, salt, pepper, and, in the traditional version, a small confession of cognac. The British call nearly the same thing Marie Rose sauce. And yes: the man who has narrated entire monologues about American condiments builds this sauce with ketchup, willingly. When I raised this, he said, without blinking, «It is not ketchup. It is an ingredient of a French sauce. The ketchup has been promoted.» There is no arguing with this. I've stopped trying.
The recipe (serves 4, ten minutes)
You need: 2 ripe avocados · 200 g (7 oz) small cooked shrimp (sold as salad or bay shrimp), drained and patted very dry · 4 tablespoons mayonnaise · 1½ tablespoons ketchup · 1 teaspoon lemon juice, plus more for the avocado · a few drops of Tabasco · 1 teaspoon cognac (optional, traditional) · salt and pepper · sweet paprika and chives to finish · small lettuce leaves to serve.
The method:
1. Whisk the mayonnaise, ketchup, lemon juice, Tabasco, and cognac together. Season with salt and pepper. Taste it — it should be tangy, faintly spicy, the color of a sunset behaving itself.
2. Fold in the shrimp until every one is coated. Chill while you do the avocados.
3. Halve the avocados lengthwise, remove the pits, and leave the skins on — the skin is the dish. Brush the cut flesh with lemon juice.
4. Pile the shrimp generously into each half. Generously. An under-filled avocado is, I'm told, «a broken promise.»
5. Dust with paprika, scatter the chives, set each half on a lettuce leaf, and serve cold — with bread, and with the seriousness the dish deserves.
Do the kids actually eat this?
Ours do — minus the cognac and the Tabasco in their portion of the sauce. This is the French system working as designed: there is no separate children's meal in this house, so a four-year-old and a two-year-old eat shrimp out of an avocado on a Sunday and consider it normal, the same way a typical French dinner simply includes them. The baby gets avocado. The baby is very pro-avocado.
The one rule
Make the sauce ahead if you like — it improves in the fridge for a few hours — but cut and fill the avocados at the last minute. A browned avocado half is the only way to fail this dish, and he will notice, and he will be polite about it, which is somehow worse.
Questions, answered
What is the sauce in avocat aux crevettes?
Sauce cocktail — mayonnaise and ketchup (roughly 3:1), sharpened with lemon juice and Tabasco, traditionally finished with a drop of cognac. In Britain the same sauce is called Marie Rose.
Can I make avocat aux crevettes ahead of time?
The shrimp in sauce, yes — it holds a few hours in the fridge. But halve and fill the avocados just before serving; cut avocado browns even with lemon juice on it.
What shrimp should I use for avocat aux crevettes?
Small cooked shrimp — sold as salad shrimp or bay shrimp in the US. They mimic the little French crevettes roses. Pat them very dry, or they'll thin the sauce.
For the video of him plating this like a state ceremony, we're on Instagram — and Le Bulletin gets one field note like this a month.