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Cream Fish

A creamy fish soup made with fish, milk, butter, egg, fish sauce, and thickened with corn starch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cream Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the fish as desired.

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, combine the fish, milk, and butter.

  2. Boil for one minute.

  3. Add the egg and fish sauce.

  4. Mix in the corn starch rubbed smooth in milk.

Serve

  1. Serve hot, preferably on toast.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Fish + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Provides the main protein and flavor of the soup.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and gives the soup a creamy body.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Egg
Adds richness and helps thicken the soup as it heats.
Corn starch
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when heated.
Fish sauce
Adds savory depth and salty umami to the soup.

The step that matters

Mix in the corn starch rubbed smooth in milk.. Starch dispersed in cold milk before adding it to hot liquid avoids lumps. Its granules swell and thicken the soup as it heats, so the mixture should be stirred in smoothly.

“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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