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Prawn Cutlets
Take as many prawns as you require cutlets, remove the shells and heads, but leave the tails. Slit the prawns down the middle, and gently beat them flat with a rolling-pin; season with salt and pepper, brush them with the yolk of egg, and dredge with flour. Fry in butter over a moderate fire to a rich bright brown. Fry a few sprigs of parsley in the same butter, and lay them on the prawns as a garnish.
A quick fried prawn dish that depends entirely on speed and on prawns big enough to flatten. Everything else is seasoning.
- Size matters mostThe common English prawn (Palaemon serratus) reaches three to four inches, larger than the brown shrimp of the same waters. Use large raw prawns, 16/20 count or bigger; smaller ones are hard to flatten without shredding.
- Slit down the middleUsually read as a butterfly cut: slit the prawn, not quite through, and open it out flat. The recipe leaves the tail on, which gives something to hold, in the manner of a cutlet.
- Beat gentlyA few light taps between two sheets of parchment is enough to even the thickness. Prawn flesh is delicate and will shred if struck as you would a veal escalope.
- Egg then flourYolk first, then flour, produces a thin gilded film rather than a batter. Beat the yolk with a teaspoon of water so it brushes on evenly, and dredge in seasoned flour just before the pan.
- Moderate fireMedium heat. Butter alone will brown and burn if pushed harder; clarified butter, or butter with a spoon of neutral oil, holds up better.
- Two minutes, not moreFlattened prawns cook through in about a minute per side and turn pink and firm. Frying "to a rich bright brown" refers to the egg-and-flour coating, not to prolonged cooking; overdone prawns go rubbery.
- Fried parsleyThe sprigs must be bone dry or the butter will spit. They need only ten to fifteen seconds and go from bright green to bitter and black very quickly.
- YieldAllow four to six prawns a head as a savoury or first course, more if serving as a main with rice or bread and lemon.
Cassell's uses cutlet in a sense now largely lost, and looser than a technical definition: not a chop but any small portion of meat, fish or shellfish trimmed to a neat shape and served with a projecting bone or, here, a tail to hold. The same logic gives us lamb cutlets frenched to the bone and the moulded veal and chicken cutlets that fill Victorian cookery books. Prawns of the size this recipe assumes were a familiar English catch, and were distinguished sharply from the smaller brown shrimp used for potting. Dishes like this belong to the late-Victorian savoury and supper repertoire, where a few shellfish, an egg yolk and butter were made to look like a course; the fried parsley garnish, a common accompaniment to fried fish and similar dishes, largely disappeared from home kitchens in the twentieth century.