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Prawn Soup

A clear stock-based soup with prawns, vegetables, and a lemon-anchovy butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Prawn Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Mince the carrot, onion, celery, and turnip until fine.

  2. Melt the butter in a stewpan, add the vegetables, and simmer for 15 minutes, stirring well.

Make the soup

  1. Heat the stock in a separate pot.

  2. Cut the bread into dice and boil it in the stock.

  3. Add the simmered vegetables and salt to the stock and boil together.

  4. Pick the tails from the prawns and stew the bodies in the wine.

  5. Press the prawn bodies through a colander and mix with the soup.

  6. Add cayenne pepper, anchovy butter, and lemon juice, and boil for 5 more minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve over fried croutons in a tureen.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melted to cook the vegetables gently, carrying their flavour into the soup.
White bread
Diced bread boiled in the stock thickens the soup and gives it body.
Prawns
Their bodies, stewed and pressed through, give the soup its main seafood flavour.
White wine
Stewing the prawn bodies in wine adds acidity and aroma to the base.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the seafood soup.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, celery, turnip, butter, bread, white wine, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, celery, turnip, butter, bread, white wine, pepper. 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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