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Madras Prawn Curry

A spicy curry of prawns simmered with butter, onion, curry powder, and spinach, served with fried bread garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and spinach are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,400 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Madras Prawn Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the curry

  1. Melt the butter in a stew-pan.

  2. Brown the minced onion in the butter.

  3. Add the prawns and season with salt, pepper, and curry powder.

Add the spinach

  1. In a separate stew-pan, cook the spinach without water until tender.

  2. Pass the cooked spinach through a sieve into the stew-pan with the prawns.

  3. Simmer everything together for a few minutes to combine flavors.

Serve

  1. Dish up and garnish with fried bread slices before serving.

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. Pepper + spinachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Onion + spinachtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. 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

Prawns
Form the main protein and the body of the dish.
Butter
Carries the curry spices and adds richness and a rounded mouthfeel.
Onion
Browns in the butter to add sweetness and savory depth to the base.
Spinach
Adds moisture and a smooth, thickened texture when passed through a sieve.

The step that matters

Browning the minced onion. Onion that is pale or only softened lacks the sweet, deep base the curry needs. Browning slowly in butter lets its sugars caramelize, and the curry powder added later tastes flatter over an underdone base.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, pepper, bread):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, pepper, bread. 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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