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Prawns, Curried

A quick sauté of prawns in butter, onions, curry powder, salt, and hot water, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42,912 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Prawns, Curried

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. When it boils, add the sliced onions and fry until brown.

  3. Stir in the curry powder and mix well.

  4. Add the picked prawns and keep stirring until browned.

  5. Add the salt and hot water, then cover the pan.

  6. Let it simmer for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with a bowl of rice.

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. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries the curry spices and adds richness to the sauce.
Onions
Browning them adds sweetness and savory depth to the base.
Curry powder
Blooms in the hot fat to release aroma and flavor.
Prawns
Provide the main protein and browning adds savory flavor.

The step that matters

Frying the onions until brown. Onions that are only softened stay pale and sharp-tasting. Frying until brown caramelizes their natural sugars, building the sweet, deep base the curry depends on.

“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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