Skip to main content
Main

Fish Soup

A savory fish soup made with butter, fish, vegetables, and herbs, served with toasted bread or croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Cut the fish into small pieces and fry until rich brown.

  3. Cover the fish with water, using 1 quart for every 1½ pounds of fish.

  4. Add the carrot, turnip, onion, parsley, salt, and pepper.

  5. Boil slowly for 1 hour.

  6. Mash the mixture gently through a colander.

Finish and serve

  1. Return the strained soup to the fire and add a little butter.

  2. Serve with small bits of toasted bread or croutons in the tureen.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fish
Provides the main flavour and body of the soup as it breaks down in the liquid.
Butter
Frying the fish in butter browns it and adds richness to the finished soup.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and body as it softens during the long simmer.
Onion
Adds aromatic depth and savoury flavour to the broth.

The step that matters

Frying the fish until rich brown. Browning the fish through the Maillard reaction builds deep, savoury flavour. Frying too gently only steams the pieces, leaving the soup pale and flat-tasting.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, fish, carrot, turnip, parsley, pepper, bread):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, fish, carrot, turnip, parsley, pepper, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More fish soup recipes

White 9Lake and Pond 6Water Soucy 6Brown 4Clear 3Russian 3 See all 129 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesFried FishFried Fish120 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipes