Marie Rose Sauce

There's a particular kind of evening this sauce belongs to. Late spring, maybe early summer, when the days have stretched out and you've got people coming round and you can't quite face cooking anything that needs your attention. Cold prawns. A wedge of lemon. A bowl of this on the table. Bread and butter. Done.

Marie Rose has been laughed at for years now, dismissed as a relic from the prawn cocktail era, all hostess trolleys and avocados in glass coupes. I've never quite understood the sneering. It's a good sauce. It takes thirty seconds. It makes prawns taste more like prawns and turns a tired iceberg lettuce into something worth eating. We're only making dinner.

The trick, if there is one, is balance. Too much ketchup and it slides into something cloying and childish. Too little and you've just got pink mayonnaise. A drop of Worcestershire pulls it savoury. A pinch of cayenne keeps it interesting. A splash of brandy if you're feeling generous, which is the version my mother made and the version I still come back to.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago, on a page also containing a shopping list and a phone number I no longer recognise. "Mayo, ketchup, Worcs, brandy, lemon, cayenne. Don't muck about with it." That's still the recipe.