Shellfish Essence

Essences are good for using in cream and butter sauces, for mixing with lemon juice and oils for salad dressing, or reduced and added to butter to make a shellfish butter.

This recipe works for lobster, shrimp, or prawn shells (crab shells don’t give up much flavor or color and are usually too hard to process), and is one we developed at Stars in San Francisco in the early 1980s. I have since seen this method only in the restaurants of people who worked there, but it could be as old