Skip to main content
Main

Soles or Carp Stewed in Cream

A creamy stew of fresh soles or carp simmered with mace, cayenne, salt, lemon, and optional thickener.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Soles or Carp Stewed in Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the fish

  1. Bring a pot of salted water to a boil.

  2. Add the fish and simmer for 2 minutes.

  3. Remove the fish and let them drain.

Stew in cream

  1. Place the fish in a wide saucepan and cover with cream.

  2. Season with mace, cayenne, and salt.

  3. Stew the fish gently for 6 to 10 minutes until the flesh separates from the bones.

Serve

  1. Transfer the fish to a serving dish.

  2. Stir lemon juice into the sauce and pour it over the fish.

  3. Serve immediately.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Mace + milktop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,346 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  5. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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
The main protein; gentle stewing firms the flesh and makes it separate easily from the bones.
Sweet rich cream
Forms the sauce, adding richness, body and a mild sweetness that carries the spices.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and balances the spices.
Mace
Contributes a warm, aromatic flavour to the cream sauce.

The step that matters

Stew the fish gently. Cream can curdle or break if boiled hard, and fish toughens and dries when overcooked. Gentle heat keeps the sauce smooth and the flesh tender, so it separates cleanly from the bones.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, mace, pepper, milk):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Strawberryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, mace, pepper, milk. 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 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes