Portuguese-Style Spicy Shrimp (Camarões á Portuguesa)

This is my own variation on a recipe from, "Portuguese Homestyle Cooking," by Ana Patuleia Ortins, Interlink Books, 2008 edition. The Portuguese title of the recipe, "Camarões á Portuguesa," is taken from the book. This is not a dish that will make your mouth melt with heat, but if you like more heat, add a whole chili or two.

Ingredients (about 6 to 8 servings):

1/4 cup olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, chopped
2/3 cup chopped tomato, with juice
1 bay leaf
1/2 jalapeño or serrano pepper, finely chopped or 1/2 teaspoon dried red pepper flakes
1/2 cup white wine
1 tablespoon cilantro, finely chopped
2 pounds shrimp *
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter

In a sauce pan, heat the olive oil over medium heat, then add the onion. Cook for a couple of minutes until the onion is softening, then add the garlic, tomato and chili pepper (fresh or dried), cook 2 minutes, then reduce heat to low, add the wine and bay leaf, cover and cook for another 5 minutes, before adding the shrimp, cilantro and salt. Simmer just until the shrimp are tender, do not overcook, unless you want shrimp that are tough. Remove the shrimp from the pan and put them into a serving dish or into individual serving dishes. Melt the butter in the hot broth. The author says her father never pureed the broth, and that she does so only occasionally, but the broth is used as a dip for the shrimp. I did not puree the broth, and the oil and butter in it almost silky.    

* The actual recipe calls for this to be "peel and eat shrimp," and thus, the shrimp are in their shells. I used cleaned (deveined), tail on shrimp of medium size (41/50 per pound).

 WORD HISTORY:
Portugal-This name for the country on the Iberian Peninsula, and neighbor of Spain, which borders it to the north and east, is a compound of Latin "portus" and "Cale." The first part is related to "port" (a word English borrowed from Latin), and distantly related to "ford" (an original English word from the Germanic roots of English). It goes back to the Indo European root "per," which had the notion of "cross over, to pass over or through." This then produced the extended "perts," meaning "crossing." This gave Latin "portus," which meant, "harbor (also spelled, "harbour," British English and many former British colonies), "seemingly" from the idea of, "a place, or the place, a ship docks after crossing a body of water;" thus also from an extended notion, "entrance to a city" (later, regardless of being on or even near water). The Romans had named a prominent harbor city, in what is now Portugal, "Portus Cale," which later came to be applied to the entire area of what is now Portugal, and the city came to be called, "Oporto." The second part of "Portugal" comes from "Cale," a word somewhat disputed in its history, but which I believe comes from the name of one of the Celtic tribes of that region, the Gallaeci, whose related branch to the north gave their name to a large area of western Europe, and Roman province, "Gaul." "Portus Cale" morphed into "Portungale/Portyngale," before the modern version.