Prawn cocktail
dish of prawns
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 (its life) 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".
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This entry incorporates text from “Prawn cocktail” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.