Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Soles

A stew of sole fillets coated with egg, herbs, and mushrooms, served with a veal consommé sauce flavored with caviar, lemon, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Stewed Soles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fillets

  1. Remove the gills from the soles and rub the fillets with the beaten egg.

  2. Sprinkle the fillets with parsley, échalote, thyme, and mushrooms.

  3. Roll the fillets and secure them with a piece of thread.

  4. Fry the fillets until light brown, then drain the fat and keep them warm.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, combine the yolks of two boiled eggs, butter, and flour.

  2. Dissolve this mixture in veal consommé over low heat until thickened.

  3. Add caviar, lemon juice, and cayenne pepper to the sauce.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce into a dish and arrange the fried fillets on top.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + mushroomtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Butter + caviartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together107 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Parsley + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,132 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

Fillets of soles
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked by frying and wrapped around the filling.
Beaten egg
Binds the herb and mushroom coating so it adheres to the fillets.
Boiled egg yolks
Thicken the sauce by combining with butter, flour and consommé for a smooth, rich texture.
Flour
Thickens the butter and yolk mixture so it can bind the consommé into a sauce.
Veal consomme
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it is heated gently.
Button mushrooms
Add moisture and savory flavour to the filling inside the rolled fillets.

The step that matters

Dissolving the yolk, butter and flour mixture in consommé over low heat. Over high heat the egg yolks can scramble and the flour can lump, so the sauce may turn grainy instead of smoothly thickened. Gentle heat lets the starch and yolk thicken evenly.

Swap the thyme

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, parsley, mushroom, butter, flour, veal, caviar):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits about as well
  3. Thymethe original
  4. Nutmegfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, parsley, mushroom, butter, flour, veal, caviar. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesVeal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipesBeef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipes