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Fish Souffle

A steamed fish soufflé made with whiting, butter, flour, milk, egg, cream, and fish stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Fish Souffle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Skin the whiting and remove the fillet from the bone.

Make the panada

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour, and add the milk.

  2. Cook until the mixture leaves the sides of the pan clean, stirring constantly.

Mould and steam

  1. Pound the panada, fish, and egg together in a mortar.

  2. Season well and rub through a sieve.

  3. Fold in the whipped cream.

  4. Steam in buttered dariole molds for 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Turn out and serve with sauce as for fillets of sole, omitting the parsley.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Whiting + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together135 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Whiting
Forms the delicate, mild body of the soufflé once pounded and sieved.
Egg
Binds the fish and panada together so the mixture holds its shape when steamed.
Butter
Enriches the panada and adds richness to the soufflé's texture.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a panada that gives the soufflé its structure.
Cream
Whipped and folded in to lighten the mixture and add moisture.

The step that matters

Cooking the panada. Cooking the flour, butter and milk until the mixture leaves the pan sides starves it of raw flour taste and gives a stable, thick base. Undercooked panada stays loose and makes the soufflé collapse or turn heavy.

“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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