Shrimp Wiggle

Three months ago I wrote about a dish that Donna’s aunt used to serve to her kids when they were growing up – Egg Wiggle. An internet search came up empty on a recipe or any mention, so I thought that it was something Aunt Mary had made up. I was wrong, but only because there was no mention of seafood.

Tonight while I was re-reading Robert Parker’s “Cold Service” I was shocked to come across this passage:

Cecile and Susan talked about their respective practices, and I shared occasional thoughts on sex and baseball, which, by and large, were all I had for thoughts. As usual, Hawk said little, though he seemed to enjoy listening. I had been reading a book on the human genome. We talked about that for a while. Cecile served us a variation of a dish my father called “shrimp wiggle”: shrimp and peas in a cream sauce. Cecile served hers in pastry shells. My father didn’t know what a pastry shell was, and with good reason.

So I searched the interweb for Shrimp Wiggle and got lots of hits. Even got one return that was a list of other Wiggle recipes from Cooks.com that feature salmon, tuna, shrimp and chicken. Now maybe with four kids in the house at once Donna’s aunt & uncle couldn’t afford meat to put in there or maybe there was meat in there and the kids just didn’t remember it because of the overall weirdness of peas & hard boiled egg pieces in a cream sauce. Either way, mystery solved.