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To Butter Prawns or Shrimps

A dish of prawns or shrimps stewed in gravy, then coated with butter and flour, served on toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Butter Prawns or Shrimps

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Remove the prawns or shrimps from their shells.

  2. Stew them in good gravy for five minutes.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix butter and flour together, then add to the stew.

  2. Season with mace and pepper.

  3. Serve on sippets and arrange some around the dish.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Shrimp + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,931 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 or shrimps
Form the main body of the dish, turning firm and tender as they cook in the gravy.
Good gravy
Provides the moist, savory liquid that the prawns cook in and the sauce is built on.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy mouthfeel to the finished stew.
Flour
Thickens the stew as it heats, giving the gravy body.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic flavor to the stew.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture. Flour clumps if dropped straight into hot liquid. Blending it into the butter first coats each grain with fat, so it disperses evenly and thickens the stew smoothly instead of forming lumps.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against shrimp, butter, flour, pepper, bread. 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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