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Prawns, Curried
Melt three ounces of butter in a saucepan; when it boils put in two ounces of onions, sliced, and fry them brown, then add a dessert-spoonful of curry-powder; stir well, and put in half a pint of picked prawns. Keep stirring until well browned, then add half a tea-spoonful of salt and a quarter of a pint of hot water. Cover the pan, and let it simmer for ten minutes. The curry will then be ready. Serve with a border of rice.
A brisk Anglo-Indian curry built on already-cooked shellfish, which is where the one real problem lies.
- The prawns are already cooked"Picked" prawns means shelled, and in this book they would have been boiled before sale. Frying them until "well browned" and then simmering ten minutes will make them tough; cook the onion, powder and liquid into a sauce first and give the prawns two or three minutes at the end, just to heat through.
- Half a pint of prawnsA volume measure for a solid: half an imperial pint of shelled prawns packed loosely is perhaps 6-9 oz by weight, say 175-250 g. Raw shell-on prawns would need roughly a pound to yield the upper end of that.
- Dessert-spoonfulTwo level teaspoons. Modern commercial curry powders may well be hotter and more assertive than the blend the book assumes, so start at that measure rather than increasing it.
- Fry the powder, brieflyStirring the curry powder into the hot butter before any liquid goes in is the step that matters -- it cooks off the raw, dusty taste of the ground spice. Thirty seconds to a minute over moderate heat; if it darkens or smells acrid the turmeric and coriander have burnt and the dish will be bitter.
- Three ounces of butterAbout 85 g for a two-person dish, which is generous even by period standards. Two ounces carries the spices perfectly well; skim any surplus fat from the surface before serving.
- "When it boils"Butter does not boil so much as foam and stop spitting once the water has driven off. That point, before the milk solids colour, is when the onions go in.
- The liquidA quarter pint (about 140 ml) of hot water gives a thin gravy. Coconut milk or a spoonful of the prawn shells' cooking liquor gives more body, and a squeeze of lemon at the end lifts the whole thing.
- Yield and the rice borderServes two as a main course, three or four as part of a larger meal. A "border of rice" means plain boiled long-grain rice pressed into a ring mould or shaped with a spoon around the edge of a hot dish, curry spooned into the middle.
Curried prawns of this kind belong to the Anglo-Indian repertoire that had settled firmly into British domestic cookery by the later nineteenth century. The method here -- brown the onion, fry the powder, add the main ingredient, moisten, simmer -- is the standard British kitchen curry formula of the period, reliant on ready-made curry powder sold by grocers rather than on spices ground at home, and applied more or less identically to rabbit, veal, eggs, lobster or yesterday's mutton. Prawns were a natural candidate: sold shelled and boiled by fishmongers and hawkers, they needed no butchering and kept badly, so a strongly flavoured dish that used them up the same day was practical. The rice "border" reflects the era's insistence that rice be a neat architectural frame rather than a bed.