[Sca-cooks] Sca-cooks Digest, Vol 93, Issue 22 -- The Lobster Thread

[Terry Decker]

> Re prawns, actual prawns, such as the Dublin Bay prawn, are in fact quite 
> a lot like small lobsters; it is a marketing convention and 
> restauranteur's tradition to refer to large shrimp by that name (for 
> example, the scampi referred to in the name "shrimp scampi" are 
> lobster-like prawns; in this case prepared in a manner that had previous 
> been traditional for actual scampi).
>
> Adamantius, hitting the books again

Dublin Bay prawn and scampi are historically Nephrops norvegicus, a fairly 
common European spiny lobster.

Prawn is a common name with no fixed taxonomic relations and is used to 
refer to almost any of the large swimming crustaceans.  And just to confuse 
things, regional usage determines what is a prawn and what is a shrimp.

Bear