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To Curry Prawns

A curry dish made with prawns, onion, curry powder, Cornubian sauce, served over boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,433 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

To Curry Prawns

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Boil the onion in a small amount of water until it becomes a pulp.

  2. Add the heads and shells of the prawns to the onion pulp and strain the mixture.

  3. Pour the strained liquid into a stewpan and warm it gently until it simmers.

Cook the curry

  1. Add the prawns, curry powder, and Cornubian sauce to the stewpan.

  2. Let the mixture simmer for about 2 minutes, stirring well.

Serve

  1. Serve the prawns over 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.

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. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Onion + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sauce + ricetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,396 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Onion and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,474 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Softens into a pulp that thickens the liquid and adds body and mild sweetness.
Prawns
Provide the main protein, and their shells add savoury flavour to the strained liquid.
Curry powder
Supplies the warm spice aroma and the characteristic flavour of the dish.

The step that matters

Simmering the prawns. Prawn protein tightens and turns rubbery when overheated for too long, so the prawns should be simmered only briefly, just until cooked through.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Tomatofits better
  2. Welsh onionfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, 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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