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Prawns, Boiled
Put two table-spoonfuls of salt into half a gallon of water, and bring the liquid to the boil. Throw in the prawns, and let them remain for about eight minutes. They are done enough when they change colour. Drain them on a sieve, and let them cool. They should be served while fresh. Stale prawns which are not too stale will be improved if they are thrown for one minute into fast-boiling water, before they are served. Prawns are best when they have no spawn under their tails.
A straightforward brine boil, but the timing belongs to a period when prawns were sold live or barely hours out of the water. The eight minutes is the one figure to ignore.
- Cook for two to three minutes, not eightShell-on prawns are done the moment the shells turn pink-orange and the flesh is opaque — one to two minutes for small ones, three at most for very large. Eight minutes gives you cotton wool. The recipe itself gives the real test: they are done when they change colour.
- The salt and waterHalf an imperial gallon is four pints (about 2.3 litres); two tablespoons of salt makes a brine of roughly 1.5 per cent. Modern practice runs saltier, closer to 3 per cent, which seasons the meat through the shell. Either works; do not cook them in unsalted water.
- Most prawns you can buy are already cookedMany prawns you can buy are already cooked -- Supermarket prawns, chilled or frozen, are often sold ready-cooked. This recipe only applies to raw (grey, translucent) prawns. Cooked ones need nothing but thawing.
- Ignore the advice on stale prawnsA minute in boiling water does not rescue shellfish that has begun to go off. Histamine and some bacterial toxins are heat-stable, and heat will not undo them. Prawns that smell of ammonia or anything but the sea go in the bin.
- CoolingSpread them in a single layer on a tray or sieve rather than heaping them, so residual heat escapes and they stop cooking. Refrigerate once cool and eat the same day.
- The spawn under the tailThe recipe treats roe as a defect but does not say why. Modern cooks often value the roe for its flavour, so treat this as a preference, not a rule.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. As a rough guide, 6-8 oz of shell-on prawns per person as a starter with bread and butter, half that if they are being picked for a salad or a sauce.
In British usage "prawn" long meant the larger, slenderer crustaceans — chiefly the common prawn, Palaemon serratus — as distinct from the small brown shrimp of the Lancashire and Norfolk sands: a prawn was something you boiled in salt water and served whole, in the shell, to be picked at table. The instruction to serve them fresh is not fussiness. Before reliable refrigeration and ice transport, shellfish reached inland markets in doubtful condition, and the frank paragraph about "stale prawns which are not too stale" suggests that households sometimes bought fish they knew to be past its best and expected the kitchen to do something about it. The dictionary format of the book — short entries alphabetised and cross-referenced — meant that a cook could look up a single technique like this without wading through a chapter.