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Water Souchy

A fish soup made by boiling fish with parsley, parsley roots, pepper, and sea salt, then simmering the fish in the broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Water Souchy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil half the weight of the fish in 2 quarts of water with broken parsley and parsley roots until it becomes a mash.

  2. Strain the mixture through a colander to extract the liquid.

  3. Add chopped parsley to the strained liquid.

Finish and serve

  1. Place the remaining fish in the liquid, season with pepper and coarse sea salt, and let it stew until thoroughly cooked.

  2. Serve the fish and soup in a tureen.

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

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

  2. Parsley + fishtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,341 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Provides the body and flavor of the broth, with the remaining fish cooked whole in it.
Parsley roots
Add earthy, aromatic flavor to the broth as it simmers.

“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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