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Peawn Soup

A seafood soup made with prawns, fish stock, mace, vinegar, and optional anchovy sauce or mushroom ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and anchovy work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 637 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Peawn Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Remove the tails from the prawns.

  2. Place the prawn bodies in a stewpan with 1 blade of mace, ½ cup vinegar, and the same amount of water.

  3. Stew for 30 minutes.

  4. Strain the liquid.

  5. In a clean stewpan, combine the fish stock with the strained liquid.

Finish the soup

  1. Pound the prawns with the crumb of the roll moistened with a little soup.

  2. Pass the mixture through a tammy.

  3. Gradually mix the prawn mixture into the soup.

  4. Add anchovy sauce or mushroom ketchup and a little lemon juice to taste.

  5. Heat through.

  6. Add a few whole prawns.

  7. Serve.

  8. If the soup is not thick enough, stir in a little butter and flour.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Fish + anchovytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together637 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Fish + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,889 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Anchovy + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Mace + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,315 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Vinegar + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Prawns
Provide the main flavour, and their shells and bodies give the stock its character.
Crumb of a french roll
Bread thickens the pounded prawn mixture, giving the soup body and a smoother texture.
Fish stock
Forms the base liquid of the soup and carries its savoury flavour.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that helps draw flavour from the prawn bodies into the liquid.
Anchovy sauce or mushroom ketchup
Adds savoury depth, umami richness that rounds out the soup.

The step that matters

Pounding and straining the prawn mixture. Bread and prawn must be pounded finely and passed through a tammy so the soup is smooth. Unstrained fragments leave a grainy texture, and adding the mixture too fast can make it lumpy, so it should be stirred in gradually.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, anchovy, vinegar, lemon):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, anchovy, vinegar, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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