Shrimp Salad Is a Friend

Why insult it?

From leftover shrimp comes shrimp salad; from leftover shrimp salad come shrimp rolls.

LEFTOVERS: SUCH A SLY WORD. It pretends to be thrifty and homey but it’s really an insult. What are you having for dinner? Oh, just leftovers. Can someone explain to me how a dish you made the effort to prepare and perhaps loved is a disappointment because you still have some?

I met a woman who is the cook in her family and whose husband “doesn’t eat leftovers.” I can’t even wrap my brain around that concept, much less imagine how anyone could go through life with a person like that. And the navigation of it all: just get a different husband!

Ingredients for shrimp salad; I took the photo with avocado, but I ate the avocado so it’s not in the salad.

I bring the word “leftovers” up because a lot of salads made from meat and seafood originated long ago as a way of using up scraps (which are leftovers), like the ham salad we talked about recently. Or, like the simple but good shrimp salad I had a hand in making, as a prep cook in a giant lodge kitchen years ago, which used the peel-and-eat shrimp that remained in the walk-in fridge after the big seafood buffet was over. (The next day, I had to peel, devein, and remove the tails of mountains of it, then cut each naked shrimp into exactly 4 even pieces; someone else turned it into shrimp salad to feed ladies whose husbands were golfing.)

Now that I am no longer a prep cook, I am free to cut my shrimp into 6 to 7 uneven pieces.

But in my case today, I bought some expensive cooked shrimp at Whole Foods because I got a bee in my bonnet about shrimp cocktail, which I love. I was feeling the way you do when you need to get some protein into your tank. So I decided rather than chicken or pork tenderloin—my standbys for times like these— I deserved to have a cold, expensive, summery shrimp cocktail, even if I wasn’t having a party or anyone over for dinner at all. I just sat and ate shrimp one night while watching most of the second half of the last season of Ozark.

But I bought too much. I have LEFTOVERS.

So today I have for you the kind of cool, sparky, simple shrimp salad that you may daintily eat off a lettuce leaf like a cute bunny or rapaciously on a buttered toasted hotdog bun like a wild animal.