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Prawns Curried

A dish of prawns cooked in a curry sauce with onion, apple, and butter, served over 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 ↓

Prawns Curried

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and core the apple, then slice it along with the onion.

  2. In a stewpan, melt the butter and sauté the onion and apple until cooked.

  3. Meanwhile, warm the tin of curry by placing it in boiling water without opening it.

  4. Cook the rice according to package instructions.

Make the curry and serve

  1. Once the tin is hot, open it and add the contents to the stewpan with a little curry paste.

  2. Serve the curry with the 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. Apple + ricetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,311 recipes

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

  3. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts to form a fat base that softens the onion and apple and carries flavour.
Sour apple
Adds tartness that balances the richness and sweetness of the curry.
Onion
Softens as it cooks, adding sweetness and body to the sauce.
Curried prawns
Provide the main protein and the curry flavour base of the dish.

The step that matters

Warming the tin without opening it. Heating the sealed tin in boiling water warms the prawns gently and keeps the contents from spilling or boiling over. Opening the tin first would expose the prawns to direct heat and loss of moisture.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, 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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