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Sauce

Prawn Butter

A sauce made by boiling prawns, pounding them into a paste, and mixing with melted butter and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Prawn Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the prawns

  1. Boil the prawns and clean them carefully.

  2. Pound the prawns to a paste in a mortar.

  3. Mix in a little butter to assist.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the remaining butter in a saucepan.

  2. Mix in the pounded prawn paste.

  3. Stir well until the prawn mixture absorbs the butter.

  4. Let it cool.

  5. Mix with iced butter in equal proportions.

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 + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Butter + macetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Prawns
Provide the main body and savoury flavour of the sauce once pounded into a paste.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty texture that carries the prawn flavour.
Cayenne pepper
Adds a sharp, gentle heat that balances the richness of the butter.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic note to the sauce.

The step that matters

Mix with iced butter in equal proportions. Cold butter added to a warm, smooth prawn mixture helps the fat emulsify into a stable sauce rather than separating into greasy pools. Adding it too warm or too quickly can break the sauce.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Sagefits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, 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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