Home › The World's Kitchen › Prawn Curry, Penang
Prawn Curry, Penang
Melt one tablespoon butter in a saucepan, add one finely chopped onion, two chopped shallots, one crushed bean sound garlic, half a branch chopped celery, one chopped parsley root, one small chopped carrot, one medium chopped apple, one chopped green pepper, one chopped chili, one sprig bay leaf, one of thyme, two whole cloves, one saltspoon dried mint, one salt spoon marjoram, one saltspoon dried basil, one saltspoon fenouil (fennel green), and two tablespoons flour. Mix whole together while browning for five minutes. Moisten with one quart hot water, season with half tablespoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper, half saltspoon cayenne, one saltspoon grated nutmeg, adding one large ripe chopped tomato, one tablespoon diluted curry powder, one piece lemon rind, thoroughly mix with spatula, and let gently simmer for fifty-five minutes.
Strain sauce into another saucepan, and add to it one pint shelled, cooked prawns, mix well and let simmer ten minutes. Arrange half-pound hot boiled rice ring-like on a hot dish, leaving a hollow space in centre. Pour the preparation into the hollow space, sprinkle a little freshly chopped parsley over and serve.
This is a French-trained cook's curry sauce more than a Malay one: a long-simmered aromatic base, strained smooth, with the prawns folded in at the end. Everything hinges on the strain and on not overcooking the shellfish.
- Cut the prawn timeTen minutes of simmering in a hot sauce will make already-cooked prawns tough and dry. Fold them into the finished sauce off the boil and give them two to three minutes to heat through, no more.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is generally reckoned a quarter teaspoon. On that reading the mint, marjoram, basil, fennel and nutmeg are each about 1/4 teaspoon, and the half-saltspoon of cayenne about 1/8.
- "One crushed bean sound garlic"Garbled text; the sense is one clove of garlic, crushed. A derivation from the French gousse d'ail is plausible but only a guess.
- Parsley root and fenouilParsley root (Hamburg parsley) is sold at farmers' markets and Eastern European groceries; a small parsnip or the white core of a fennel bulb stands in acceptably. Fenouil here is the green fronds, dried — fennel seed, lightly crushed, gives a similar note in the same quarter-teaspoon quantity.
- Diluted curry powder"Diluted" most likely means the powder is slaked to a loose paste with a little cold water before it goes in, which keeps it from scorching and catching in the flour.
- The strain mattersAll that chopped vegetable is flavouring, not texture — after fifty-five minutes it is spent. Press it firmly through a sieve to get the body out, then discard the solids. Skipping the strain leaves you with a coarse stew rather than the smooth sauce intended.
- Chili and pepperOne "chopped chili" is unspecified; a single fresh green chili is the safe reading, seeded if you want the aromatics to show. The green pepper is a sweet bell pepper.
- YieldA pint of shelled prawns with a quart of liquid reduced over the hour serves three, or four modestly.
Penang, the British-held island off the Malay peninsula, was a port where Chinese, Tamil, Malay and European cooking met. What the method reveals is not Malaysia but the classical French kitchen: this is essentially a sauce indienne, a mirepoix browned with flour, moistened, simmered, strained and finished, with curry powder taking the place of another seasoning. Filippini's book gathers such dishes from grand hotel cooking, where the great international cuisines were all translated into the same French grammar. The commercial curry powder itself was a British-Indian invention, advertised in London from the 1780s onward, and its use in a bound flour-based sauce is a mark of the European rather than the Asian tradition.