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Preserve

Prawn Soup

A prawn soup made with fish stock, prawns, a French roll crumb, mace, vinegar, lemon juice, anchovy sauce or mushroom ketchup, and butter and flour.

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 ↓

Prawn Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare 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, then stew the mixture for 30 minutes.

  3. Strain the liquid.

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

Thicken and season

  1. Pound the prawns with the crumb of the French roll moistened with some soup.

  2. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

  3. Mix the resulting puree with the soup gradually.

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

  5. Add a few picked prawns.

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

Serve

  1. Heat the soup through and serve.

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, once pounded, body to the soup.
French roll crumb
Soaked in soup and pounded, it adds starch that thickens the puree.
Fish stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup.
Butter and flour (in the method)
Together they make a roux that thickens the soup and adds richness if it is not thick enough.

The step that matters

Rubbing the puree through a fine sieve. Pounded prawn and bread stay grainy unless forced through a fine sieve, and that texture carries into the finished soup. Adding the puree gradually to the hot stock helps it blend smoothly without lumps.

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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