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Catfish Soup

A soup made with catfish, salt pork, sweet milk, eggs, celery, herbs, butter, and toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 852 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Catfish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Skin and clean the catfish, then cut them into pieces.

  2. Chop the salt pork into small pieces.

Cook the soup

  1. Combine the catfish, salt pork, water, chopped sweet herbs, and celery seasoning in a pot.

  2. Boil for 1 hour or until the fish and pork are tender.

  3. Strain the mixture and return it to the saucepan.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the hot sweet milk and beaten eggs to the pot.

  2. Stir in the butter and bring to a boil.

  3. Serve with diced toasted bread 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. Celery + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Pork + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,386 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Catfish
Provides the main body of the soup, becoming tender and flavourful as it simmers.
Salt pork
Adds savoury, fatty richness to the broth as it cooks down.
Sweet milk
Makes the soup creamy and mellows its flavour when added hot.
Eggs
Thicken the hot soup slightly and add richness and body when beaten in.
Butter
Adds fat and a smooth, rounded finish to the broth.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs and milk. Eggs can curdle or scramble if the soup is boiling hard when they go in. Adding the hot milk and beaten eggs to the pot gently, and keeping the heat controlled, helps the soup stay smooth and thickened.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (catfish, pork, milk, egg, butter, walnut, bread):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against catfish, pork, milk, egg, butter, walnut, bread. 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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