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To Boil Prawns

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,067 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Boil Prawns

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the prawns

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Parsley + vinegartop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,477 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 (in the method)
Provide the main cooked protein, which turns firm and opaque as the heat sets it.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the boiling water so the prawns take on flavour as they cook.

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.

Swap the parsley

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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