Prawn Star

It’s difficult to think of anything ‘good’ that came out of the 1970’s.

It’s the bastard decade that the rest of the century is embarrassed by. The inbred cousin who at family gatherings gets over excited and starts dribbling only to be ignored in the hope that he will just do the decent thing and die quietly in the corner. 

It was the decade that gave us Peters & Lee, terrorism at the Olympics, suburban wife swapping and Thatcher. Thanks a bunch 1970’s.

The food wasn’t a whole lot better.

In our house, Vesta Curry or a Fray Bentos pie from a tin followed with, if we were lucky, a fluorescent Angel Delight that tasted like shampoo and bubble gum was considered the cornerstone of a balanced and faintly exotic meal.

The only and very occasional jewel that lit up the ’70’s table was the appearance on high days and holidays of a deep pink mound of freshly defrosted prawns, covered in a wonderfully cloying sauce all piled on wilting lettuce and served in a Martini glass with a slice of lemon jauntily wedged on its rim.

The Prawn Cocktail drenched in Marie Rose sauce, possibly the best, and maybe the only, decent thing to come out of the 1970’s kitchen.

So why has the Prawn Cocktail fallen form grace? Why isn’t it celebrated and enjoyed in the very best restaurants, why can it only be found on the menu at Harvesters (£3.49 with a Thousand Island Dressing - - wrong) or at painfully ironic dinner parties held in Shoreditch?

It’s all because of the sauce.

The very thing that makes a prawn cocktail great, the thick almost cackling Marie Rose sauce that catches at the back of throat, is also what makes the dish deeply unfashionable, hated by chefs and completely and sublimely wonderful.

Back in the ‘70’s the quality of prawns left an awful lot to be desired.

Fresh un-cooked prawns, on ice, in their shells? Forget it.

What prawns we had were deep frozen, badly transported, little pink bullets which when defrosted had the strange texture of rubbery cardboard and the lingering taste of the inside of a cat’s mouth.

But despite these major drawbacks in both taste and texture we couldn’t get enough of them.

Prawns screamed glamour, they screamed expensive, they screamed that ‘yes, we have a new Ford Granda, Melamine kitchen and wall to wall shag.’ A prawn cocktail was a social indicator that you where going somewhere, that you had money and therefore good taste.

But, of course, you didn’t have ‘good taste’ because as with most things that people buy to impress others with, the only impressive thing about 1970’s frozen North Atlantic prawn was it’s price.

So the 1970’s host had a dilemma. How to show off your taste in expensive ingredients without actually making your guests retch?

What was needed to make the dish eatable, enjoyable even, was a strong flavoured sauce, so strong in fact that the main ingredient could be hidden, masked, used purely as a delivery system for the sauce.  

What was needed was a sauce that could stage a culinary coup and usurp the main ingredient entirely, taking over and becoming the reason for the dish to exist in the first place.

And that is what a Marie Rose sauce was born to do – it’s the ultimate culinary bullyboy.

No one in their right mind would take a flavour as delicate, light and precise as a fresh prawn and smother it in a combination of ketchup, mayonnaise and Tabasco but, in a trick as old as cooking itself, it you are faced with sub standard produce that is exactly what you do… smoother it in a heavy sauce.

Thankfully things have changed.

Some of the countries best chefs have, while not embracing the prawn cocktail, have allowed its upper class cousin the Seaford Cocktail to creep back onto their menus. Richard Corrigan’s Bentleys does a very fine, very dignified Seafood Cocktail that is light, luxurious and full of ozone tasting morsels.

However, most restaurants serving prawns, or any sea food, with anything other than the lightest of sauces, a little chilli or maybe a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil would be burned to the ground by a rampaging mob of Sunday supplement reading food snobs.   

And that’s a shame.

Because when it’s done with skill and attention there is a place for the 1970’s inspired Prawn Cocktail. A place which isn’t to do with the ironic, the kitsch or the camp but because it tastes really good and, with a few small alterations and changes, can work well with good quality, meaty, fresh king prawns.

Oh… and Prawn Cocktail is never acceptable as a sandwich filling.


First printed in the excellent http://www.theretrocollective.com/