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Clear Fish Soup

A clear soup made with fish stock, egg yolks, arrowroot, cream, Madeira, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and pepper work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 329 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Clear Fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a stewpan, combine the egg yolks, arrowroot, cream, salt, and pepper.

  2. Stir in the Madeira and mix well.

  3. Pour the mixture into the clarified fish stock and whisk continuously until it reaches a boil.

  4. Strain the soup into a tureen and serve with small squares of bread fried in butter or toasted.

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. Arrowroot + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together329 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + fishtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,948 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Cream + peppertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Arrowroot + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

Cream and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 21,449 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the soup and enrich it as they set gently with heat.
Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid to a light, glossy body without clouding it.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, rounder mouthfeel to the soup.
Madeira
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth.

The step that matters

Whisking into the boil. Egg yolks can scramble or curdle if the mixture overheats. Whisking constantly keeps the heat even and the soup smooth, and stopping at the boil prevents the yolks from setting into lumps.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, cream, pepper, fish):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream, pepper, fish. 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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