For ➋10 jumbo prawns cleaned, peel intact
½ ts coarse salt
1 tbs melted butter
½ lemon, rasped & juiced
100 g plain bread crumbs
20 g prepared horseradish
10 cl cream
¼ ts salt
¼ ts cayenne pepper
15 cl sour cream
1 tbs chopped parsley
2 leaves of lettuce hearts
Preheat a grill pan over medium high heat. Loosen shells of prawns and butterfly them cutting down the vein line of the back of the prawns. Toss prawns with coarse salt.
Combine melted butter with lemon juice and zest.
Cover prawns with lemon butter and set on hot grill. Grill prawns 3 to 4 m on each side, until pink and firm.
In a bowl, combine bread crumbs, horseradish, cream and salt. Let the cream soak into the bread crumbs for 2 m. Loosen bread crumbs with a fork. Stir in cayenne and combine with sour cream. Spoon equal amounts of sauce into ramekins on individual plates or a dip bowl in the centre or a large platter. Arrange 5 grilled prawns on a leaf of romaine lettuce.
Serve shrimps with seafood forks alongside dipping sauce.Or shred a leaf of lettuce, put in a cocktail glass, add dipping sauce and arrange (at least 1) shrimp(s) on the rim of the glass or on top of the dipping and lettuce.
The origin of the shrimp cocktail goes back to the late 19th or early 20th century. Contemporary American cookbooks confirm that the combination of shellfish (most typically oysters) and a spicy tomato-based sauce (usually ketchup spiced with horseradish, Tabasco and cayenne) served in tiny cups as appetizers was extremely popular in the early part of the 20th century. Most of the times, it was just a way of presenting the food with a dipping sauce. So-called cocktail appetizers were extremely popular during the 1920s, the decade of Prohibition, when these appetizers were served in cocktail glasses, originally meant to hold alcoholic beverages.
Although it probably existed before, the idea of the shrimp cocktail was launched to a large audience by the New York Times Christmas dinner suggestion in 1926, making it more a starter than an appetizer by adding more ingredients like lettuce.
It became extremely popular during during the 50's and spread to Europe in the 60's, as a fashionable sign of the new prosperity.
Try a Belgian variation by replacing the sauce with Belgian cocktail sauce. (Shrimps might be steamed.)
