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Fish Soup

A broth made with fish, onions, carrots, herbs, and spices, simmered in cold water.

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

Fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a pot, fry the sliced onions in butter until they turn yellow.

  2. Add the fish, sliced carrots, additional onions, parsley, thyme, garlic, bay leaf, clove, peppercorns, and salt.

Cook and serve

  1. Cover the mixture with cold water and boil gently for 2 hours, adding more water if needed.

  2. Strain the soup and serve.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Thyme + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Provides the main flavour and body of the broth as it cooks down.
Onions
Frying them in butter first builds sweetness and a deeper savoury base.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the broth during the long simmer.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour from the aromatics into the soup.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 2 hours. A gentle simmer extracts flavour from the fish and bones without breaking the fish apart or making the broth cloudy. A hard boil emulsifies fats and toughens the flesh.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, fish, salmon, carrot, parsley, thyme):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Fennelfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, fish, salmon, carrot, parsley, thyme. 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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