Clean and pick 3 dozen prawns. Heat some dripping in a large saucepan; add the prawns, 1 chopped onion, salt, pepper and 1 teaspoonful of curry-powder. Add 1 pint of stock and let simmer half an hour until tender. Serve on a border of boiled rice; garnish with fried parsley.
A very short curry of the Edwardian type, where curry-powder is treated as a single seasoning rather than a blend to be bloomed. The one thing to change is the cooking time.
- The half-hour simmerPrawns are cooked through in two to three minutes and turn rubbery well before thirty. Build and reduce the sauce first, then add the prawns at the end and take the pan off the heat as soon as they turn opaque.
- Three dozen prawnsThe size is not stated, but a count of 36 for a dish serving about four suggests the smallish prawns of the period rather than large modern tiger prawns. Reckon on roughly 8-12 oz of picked meat, or 1.5 to 2 lb of shell-on prawns.
- Clean and pickPeriod shorthand for shelling; with larger prawns you will also want to remove the dark vein along the back. If your prawns come with heads and shells, simmer those in the stock for ten minutes and strain — it costs nothing and improves the dish considerably.
- DrippingBeef or bacon dripping, saved from roasting. Any neutral oil, ghee or butter works; ghee is closest in flavour to what an Anglo-Indian kitchen would have used.
- Curry-powderA teaspoon of commercial powder in a pint of liquid is very mild by current standards. Fry the powder in the fat with the onion for a minute before adding stock, which removes the raw, dusty edge that raw powder leaves in a sauce.
- A pint of stock20 fl oz if the book is British, 16 if American; nothing on the page settles it. Either way, left as written this makes a thin, soupy gravy; reduce it by half, or thicken with a teaspoon of flour stirred into the onion and fat, before the prawns go in.
- Border of boiled riceRice pressed into a ring mould, turned out onto a hot dish, with the prawns spooned into the well. About 1.5 cups dry serves four.
- Fried parsleyWhole dry sprigs dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until crisp and dark green, then drained. It must be bone dry or it will spit violently.
Curry-powder is generally traced to British kitchens of the late eighteenth century as a pre-mixed convenience, and by the time this book was compiled it had become a standard store-cupboard seasoning applied to almost anything — eggs, rabbit, leftover mutton and, as here, shellfish. Calling the result "Oriental" rather than Indian is characteristic of the day-a-dish books of the period, which ranged around the globe by way of a single flavouring rather than any regional technique. The border of rice with a filling spooned into the centre was a standard service form in Victorian and Edwardian dining, used for everything from creamed chicken to curried shellfish, and fried parsley was the all-purpose garnish of the era, cheap, green and dramatic against a pale sauce.