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Prawn Soup

A soup made with prawns, fish stock, vinegar, mace, and a crumb of French roll.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and anchovy work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 637 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Prawn Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick out the tails of the prawns.

Make the stock

  1. Put the bodies in a stewpan with 1 blade of mace, 1 pint of vinegar, and the same quantity of water.

  2. Stew for 1 hour and strain off the liquid.

  3. In a clean stewpan, add the fish stock and the strained liquid.

Finish the soup

  1. Pound the prawns with the crumb of the roll moistened with a little water.

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. Fish + anchovytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together637 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Fish + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,889 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Anchovy + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Mace + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,315 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Vinegar + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Prawns
Provide the main flavour and body of the soup once their shells and bodies are stewed.
French roll crumb
Moistened and pounded with the prawns, it thickens the soup and gives it body.
Fish stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup, carrying the prawn flavour.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that helps draw flavour out of the prawn shells during stewing.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, anchovy, vinegar, lemon):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, anchovy, vinegar, lemon. 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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