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Prawn Curry

A coconut and lime flavored prawn curry simmered with onions, curry powder, and spices, served over plain boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Prawn Curry

Why it works: Coconut and lime match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 934 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Prawn Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. In a pan, fry the chopped onion in hot fat until brown.

  2. Add the curry powder and fry for another minute.

  3. Pour in the water and season with salt, nutmeg, and coconut.

  4. Add lime juice and simmer until thickened.

  5. Strain the sauce through a sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the skinned prawns to the sauce and keep hot.

  2. Serve the prawn curry with plain boiled 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Coconut + limetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together934 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Coconut + ricetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,063 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Nutmeg + limetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together236 recipes

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

  4. Nutmeg + coconuttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together411 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-pinene (pine, resin).

  5. Lime + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,014 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

Onion
Browns in hot fat to build a sweet, savoury base for the sauce.
Curry powder
Blooms in the hot fat to release aroma and give the sauce its flavour.
Grated coconut
Adds richness and body to the sauce as it simmers.
Cooked prawns
Provide the main protein; they are already cooked, so they only need to be kept hot in the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmering until thickened. Simmering reduces the water and lets the coconut and starch-free liquid thicken gradually. Cooking too hard can make the sauce split or go grainy, and adding the prawns too early can toughen them, so keep them warm rather than boiling.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (nutmeg, coconut, lime, rice):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against nutmeg, coconut, lime, rice. 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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