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Olives of Soles

Fried sole fillets rolled with fish forcemeat, battered, and served with béchamel sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and white wine work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 370 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Olives of Soles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Fillet the soles and wipe them dry.

  2. Wash the inside of each sole with egg white.

  3. Lay a little light forcemeat made with fish inside each sole.

  4. Roll them up and run a small wooden skewer through each.

Batter and fry

  1. Dip each sole in a batter made with flour, salt, sweet oil, white wine, and beaten eggs.

  2. Heat boiling lard in a pan and fry the fillets until golden brown.

  3. Drain the fried fillets and serve with a good béchamel sauce.

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. Fish + white winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together370 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + fishtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,782 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Flour + white winetop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,082 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Fish + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Soles
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking to a delicate, flaky texture.
Egg white
Seals the inside of the rolled fillets and helps hold the forcemeat in place.
Flour
Forms the base of the batter that coats the fish and crisps when fried.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set and brown during frying.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the batter.

The step that matters

Frying the fillets until golden brown. Lard must be hot enough to set the batter quickly; if it is too cool, the coating absorbs fat and turns greasy, and the fish can overcook before the coating browns.

“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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