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Caveched Sole or Brill

Small soles or brill are fried, then baked with stock, onion, vinegar, allspice, cloves, peppercorns, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Caveched Sole or Brill

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Prepare and fry the fish, flouring it well after drying.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pot, combine the stock, sliced onion, and all the condiments, and boil until the onion is tender.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture into an oven‑safe dish, lay the fish on top, and serve very 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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Onion + allspicetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,270 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Vinegar + allspicetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,548 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  5. Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Small soles or brill
Forms the main body of the dish, its flesh cooking through and holding together in the sauce.
Lard for frying
Conducts heat to crisp and brown the floured coating on the fish.
1 onion
Softens as it simmers, adding sweetness and body to the liquid.
1 tablespoon vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Flouring and drying the fish before frying. Fish must be dried before flouring so the flour adheres evenly; a damp surface steams instead of browning and the coating can fall off in the hot fat.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, allspice, clove):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, allspice, clove. 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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