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Cray Fish Soup

A broth of flounder or other fish with onions, carrots, parsley, peppercorns, allspice, and crayfish, thickened with bread crusts.

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

Cray Fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. In a large pot, bring the cold water to a boil.

  2. Add the fish and skim the surface as it heats.

  3. Once boiling, add the onions, carrots, parsley, black peppercorns, and allspice.

  4. Add the crayfish shells and claws, and boil for 1 hour.

  5. Strain the broth and return it to the pot.

Finish the soup

  1. Add bread crusts to thicken the soup.

  2. If available, pound the lobster spawn and add it to the soup.

  3. Simmer gently for a couple of minutes, then add the crayfish and heat through before serving.

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. Parsley + allspicetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Carrot + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,021 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crusts
Starch that thickens the broth as it simmers, giving the soup body.
Crayfish shells and claws
Release flavour and colour into the broth during the long boil.
Flounders, eels, or gudgeons
Fish that add savoury depth and gelatin to the broth as they cook.
Lobster spawn
Adds richness and colour to the soup when pounded in.

The step that matters

Simmer gently after adding the crayfish. Boiling hard toughens the delicate crayfish meat and can make the soup cloudy; gentle heat warms the flesh through evenly.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, carrot, parsley, crayfish, bread, lobster):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, parsley, crayfish, bread, lobster. 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.

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