Prawn cocktail
Prawn cocktail, also known as shrimp cocktail, is a seafood dish consisting of shelled, cooked prawns in a Marie Rose sauce or cocktail sauce, served in a glass. It was the most popular hors d'œuvre in Great Britain, as well as in the United States, from the 1960s to the late 1980s. According to the English food writer Nigel Slater, the prawn cocktail "has spent most of see-sawing from the height of fashion to the laughably passé" and is now often served with a degree of irony.
The cocktail sauce is essentially ketchup and mayonnaise in Commonwealth countries, or ketchup and horseradish in the United States. Recipes may add Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, vinegar, cayenne pepper or lemon juice.
History and origins
A dish of cooked seafood with a piquant sauce of some kind is of ancient origin and many varieties exist. Oyster or shrimp dishes of this kind were popular in the United States in the late nineteenth century and some sources link the serving of the dish in cocktail glasses to the ban on alcoholic drinks during the 1920s prohibition era in the United States. A version of the shrimp cocktail was popularized in Las Vegas casinos in the late 1950s, beginning with the Golden Gate Casino on Fremont Street, which sold as many as 2,000 shrimp cocktails daily, at inexpensive prices, no more than 99 cents. The dish is considered somewhat synonymous with the gambling and entertainment mecca.In the United Kingdom, the invention of the prawn cocktail is often credited to British television chef Fanny Cradock in the 1960s; In their 1997 book The Prawn Cocktail Years, Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham note that the prawn cocktail has a "direct lineage to Escoffier".
In Britain
Nigel Slater says "it is all in the sauce", and that "the true sauce is principally mayonnaise, tomato ketchup and a couple of shakes of Tabasco."The chef Heston Blumenthal states that prawn cocktail is his "secret vice": "When I get home late after working in The Fat Duck there's nothing I like better than to raid the fridge for prawn cocktail." Blumenthal notes that it is best to use homemade mayonnaise, and recommends adding chopped basil and tarragon.
The television chef and writer Delia Smith states that the best version is with self-cooked prawns, and that in the 1960s it was "something simple but really luscious, yet over the years it has suffered from some very poor adaptations, not least watery prawns and inferior sauces."
As Hopkinson and Bareham note in The Prawn Cocktail Years, what was once considered to be the "Great British Meal" consisted of prawn cocktail, followed by steak garni with chips and Black Forest gateau for dessert; they comment that "cooked as it should be, this much-derided and often ridiculed dinner is still something very special indeed."