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Fish Meagre Soup

A fish soup made with various fish, turnip, onion, celery, garlic, mace, veal broth, and saffron.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Fish Meagre Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Sweat the fish with turnip, onion, celery, garlic, and mace until tender.

  2. Add the veal broth and let it simmer for 30 minutes.

  3. Strain and skim the soup to remove fat.

  4. Season with salt and cayenne pepper.

Clear and serve

  1. Clear the soup with the egg white and color it with saffron.

  2. Serve with celery or rice if desired.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Gives the soup its body and savoury flavour as it breaks down while sweating and simmering.
Egg white
Its proteins coagulate and trap fine particles, clearing the soup as it is heated.
Veal broth
Forms the liquid base of the soup and carries the flavour of the other ingredients.
Turnip
Adds subtle sweetness and aromatic body to the soup base.

The step that matters

Clear the soup with the egg white. The egg white must be whisked into the cool soup and heated gently so its proteins set into a raft that traps cloudy particles. If the soup boils hard or the raft is broken up, the soup stays cloudy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, salmon, turnip, onion, celery, clove, garlic):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, salmon, turnip, onion, celery, clove, garlic. 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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