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Dessert

Potted Prawns

A butter mixture flavored with cooked prawns, anchovies, and optional roe, used as a spread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and roe work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 243 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Potted Prawns

Ingredients

Directions

Make the butter

  1. Let the cooked prawn meat cool.

  2. Mix the cooked prawn meat with iced butter in equal parts.

  3. Pound the mixture thoroughly until no granulated particles remain.

Flavor and finish

  1. Add 2 anchovies for flavor to make crab‑coral butter.

  2. For lobster butter, wash the lobster meat to remove juices, then dry and pound it.

  3. Optionally, pass hard‑boiled yolks through a sieve to tint the butter yellow.

  4. Flavor with soft herring roes or cod's roes, pepper, and capers if desired.

  5. Soak very salty fish in water before use; anchovies in oil do not need soaking.

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. Egg + roetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together243 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Butter + roetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together442 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Butter + caperstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,637 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 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

Cooked prawn meat
Provides the main shellfish flavour and the solid body of the butter.
Iced butter
Supplies the fat that firms when chilled and blends smoothly with the pounded meat.
Anchovies
Add savoury depth and a salty, umami note to the butter.

The step that matters

Pound the mixture thoroughly. Pounding until no granules remain breaks the meat into fine particles and blends it evenly into the fat. Leftover gritty bits leave the butter with an uneven, sandy texture.

Swap the capers

The recipe marks capers as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, butter, egg, roe):

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Capersthe original
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, butter, egg, roe. 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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