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To Boil Prawns

A simple boiled prawn dish seasoned with parsley, salt, cayenne, sweet oil, mustard, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

To Boil Prawns

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the prawns

  1. Add a handful of salt to a pot of boiling water.

  2. When the water is boiling hard, add the prawns.

  3. Boil the prawns for 15 minutes.

  4. Remove the prawns and place them on a sieve to drain.

  5. Wipe the prawns with a dry cloth and set aside until completely cold.

Arrange and serve

  1. Arrange a handful of curled parsley in the center of a dish.

  2. Place one prawn on top of the parsley and arrange the others around it with tails facing out.

  3. Garnish with additional parsley.

  4. Serve with a mixture of salt, cayenne, sweet oil, mustard, and vinegar.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Parsley + mustardtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Prawns
Cook through in boiling water, becoming firm and opaque, and are served cold as the main dish.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich seafood in the accompanying sauce.
Sweet oil
Adds fat and smoothness to the accompanying sauce, carrying flavour across the palate.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent heat to the accompanying sauce that cuts through the richness of the prawns.

The step that matters

Boil the prawns for 15 minutes. Boiling too long toughens prawn flesh as proteins over-tighten and squeeze out moisture, so timing must be watched closely to keep them tender and juicy.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, mustard, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, mustard, vinegar. 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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