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Fish Soup

A fish soup made with skate, onions, herbs, carrot, turnips, celery, and fish heads, thickened with roux and parsley purée.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Boil skate in water with onions, herbs, carrot, turnips, and celery until reduced to 2 quarts.

  2. Strain the stock.

  3. Cut the fish flesh into small pieces.

Finish the soup

  1. Chop the parsley and pound it to make a purée.

  2. Add the purée to the soup.

  3. Thicken the soup with roux.

  4. Season the soup with salt and pepper.

  5. Serve hot.

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 + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Skate
Provides the main fish flavor and body to the stock as it simmers.
Roux
Thickens the soup, giving it a smoother, heavier texture.
Onions
Build savory depth and sweetness as they cook down into the stock.
Parsley
Adds fresh, green aroma when pounded into the soup.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup with roux. Roux thickens best when the stock is hot and added gradually while stirring, so lumps do not form and the texture stays smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, carrot, turnip, celery, fish, pepper):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, carrot, turnip, celery, fish, pepper. 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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