Prawn Cocktail Tartlets with Marie Rose Sauce

Method

1. Peel the prawns. Twist off the head, unwrap the shell, take the tail off as well, and lift the dark vein out of the back with the tip of a knife. Four hundred grams of whole prawns gives you the 200g of meat this needs.
2. Cut each prawn crossways into three and leave the pieces as they fall, curved and roughly a centimetre. Resist going smaller. A fine dice turns the filling into a paste and the tartlet stops looking like a prawn cocktail.
3. Toss the pieces with the fine salt and tip them into a sieve set over a bowl. Leave them for 10 minutes. A tablespoon or so of cloudy liquid should collect underneath, and that liquid is what would otherwise end up in the pastry.
4. Spread the prawns on paper towel and pat them dry on both sides. Do not rinse the salt off. It has already gone into the meat and it is most of the seasoning.
5. Stir the mayonnaise, chopped relish, mustard and lemon zest together until the colour is even, adding the Worcestershire if you are using it. Taste it now, before the prawns go in, because this is the only easy point to fix it. It should be a shade sharper and saltier than you want the finished tartlet, since cold food flattens seasoning.
6. Fold the prawns through the sauce. It should coat them and go no further. If sauce is pooling in the bottom of the bowl, add a few more prawns rather than pouring any off. Cover and keep it cold.
7. Open the pack of cases at this point and not before, and set them straight onto the platter you are serving from. Filling them in place saves carrying twelve loaded shells across a kitchen.
8. Spoon a heaped teaspoon into each case, three or four pieces of prawn at a time, filling to the rim rather than above it.
9. Tuck a small baby cos leaf in at the edge of each one, or scatter the chives. Finish with a pinch of paprika, a grind of black pepper and a squeeze of lemon over the whole tray at the last moment. Serve within the hour.

Questions about prawn cocktail canapes

What is Marie Rose sauce made of?

Mayonnaise, tomato, an acid and a little heat, in roughly that order of quantity. The restaurant version is usually built on tomato ketchup with lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce and a pinch of cayenne, and older recipes add a splash of brandy. Starting from a tomato relish instead of ketchup brings the vinegar in with the tomato, so the sauce needs no extra juice, and no extra juice is exactly what makes it behave inside pastry.

How many prawn tartlets do you need per person?

Two each when a meal follows and these are one of four or five things going round, which is what a pack of twelve is built for. Our canape guide puts that at 4 to 6 pieces a head in the first hour. If the finger food is the meal it moves to 10 to 14 a head over two to three hours, about two thirds savoury, so 7 to 9 savoury pieces each. Make these three of that number: a party of twelve wants 36 tartlets, three packs of cases and 600g of prawn meat.

Do the prawns really need salting and draining?

For a bowl, no. For pastry, yes. A cooked prawn is mostly water and a cut prawn leaks from every cut face, so a filling mixed straight off the chopping board is noticeably looser 20 minutes later, and it is the pastry base that absorbs the difference. Ten minutes in a sieve with half a teaspoon of salt pulls out a tablespoon or two, seasons the meat while it is at it, and is the difference between an hour on the table and twenty minutes.

What else fits these cases if prawns are out of budget?

Anything thick and cold. Cold-smoked salmon over lemony cream cheese is the closest thing to this tray, and the smoked salmon version uses the same case and the same timing, so the two trays can be built side by side and the fish counter's price on the day decides which. Leftover prawn filling is lunch either way: on buttered brown bread, or piled onto crackers with the last of the lemon. It will not keep past the next day and it does not freeze.

The cases are the part worth ordering before December, since they keep in the cupboard for months at $9.95 a pack. Confiletas mini savoury round pastry cases come twelve to a pack, and the rest of the Confiletas range travels in the same order. Shipping is free Australia-wide on orders over $100, and orders placed before 12pm on a weekday are dispatched the same day from our Corio, VIC warehouse, tracked with Australia Post.