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Caviare with Prawns

Caviar with prawns is a canapé of bread rounds topped with caviar, lemon, olives, and prawns.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Caviare with Prawns

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the croutes

  1. Fry the rounds of stale bread in butter until light brown, then drain and cool.

Make the caviare mixture

  1. In a bowl, combine the caviare, lemon juice, chopped shallot, and cayenne pepper, then stir the mixture with a wooden spoon until well combined.

Assemble and serve

  1. Place a slice of lemon on each bread round, then add a teaspoon of caviare on top.

  2. Add half an olive in the center and place a prawn on each side of the croute.

  3. Serve on a round glass dish, garnished with parsley and a few prawn heads.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Forms the crisp base that holds the topping; frying in butter gives it a light brown, sturdy surface.
Caviare
Provides the salty, briny flavour that is the centrepiece of the dish.
Prawns
Add a sweet, tender seafood element that contrasts with the salty caviare.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich caviare and balances its saltiness.

The step that matters

Frying the bread rounds. Frying until light brown, not dark, gives a crisp, sturdy base that will not go soggy under the moist topping. Overcooking makes the bread bitter and brittle.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, lemon, pepper, olive, parsley):

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Tomatofits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, lemon, pepper, olive, parsley. 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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