Recipe: William Dalrymple's Tiger Prawns

Ten minutes! That's all it takes to rustle up this recipe of Tiger Prawns belonging to well-known historian and author William Dalrymple, which has been included in Sunita Kohli's The India Cookbook.

Made with super fresh ingredients that celebrate summer, it's full of flavour, texture and crunchiness.

Dalrymple's celebrated works include The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company; Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World's Most Infamous Diamond; In Xanadu; City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi; White Mughals and The Last Mughal: Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1957. He is one of the co-founders and co-directors of the Jaipur Literature Festival and Sunita has known him since the time he was researching his first book in India, City of Djinns.

Tiger Prawns

Serves: 2-3

Ingredients

• 500 gm tiger prawns, washed and deveined
• 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 2 medium-sized fresh red chillies, de-seeded and chopped
• 2 garlic pods, peeled and roughly chopped
• 2 tsp paprika
• 2 tsp haldi or tumeric powder
• 2 tsp ground jeera or cumin powder
• 2 tsp ground ginger
• 1 medium-sized onion, chopped
• 1 small semi-ripe mango, diced
• Fresh pomegranate arils or seed pods
• 1 neebu or lime, juiced
• 2 tbsp chopped fresh green dhania or coriander or cilantro leaves

Method

• In a bowl, combine one of the red chillies, chopped onion, diced mango, pomegranate arils.
  Dress it with some of the lime juice and 1 tbsp of the chopped coriander.
  Keep aside.
• In a kadhai or frying pan, fry the garlic and the remaining red chilly in very hot olive oil for a few seconds.
  Add the cleaned prawns, paprika, turmeric powder, ground ginger, cumin powder.
  Stir and take off heat once the prawns are cooked, for about 8-10 minutes.
  Sprinkle the remaining coriander leaves and lime juice over the prawns and serve with the salad and/or plain boiled rice.

Sunita Kohli is a New Delhi designer, architect and socialite. Her book is a collection of eclectic recipes from homes she has dined at in the capital.

Please do have a look at Nalini and P Chidambaram's recipe for Crab Masala, Shashi Tharoor's Idlis, Richard Holkar's Murgi Survedar and Pheroza And Jamshed Godrej's Baked Eggs.

This recipe was excerpted with the kind permission of the publishers, Aleph Book Company from The India Cookbook: from The Tables Of My Friends, selected and edited by Sunita Kohli.

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