Skip to main content
Main

Steamed Sole

Steamed sole is a simple fish dish seasoned with sea salt and lemon, garnished with lemon slices and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Steamed Sole

Oven, in the book's wordsA very moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Skin the sole, point the tail, remove the eyes, and cut off the fins.

  2. Sprinkle the fish with coarse sea salt and a few drops of lemon juice.

  3. Prepare a steamer or a saucepan of boiling water.

Steam and serve

  1. Place the fish in the steamer or on a plate over the saucepan.

  2. Steam for about 10 minutes, until the flesh comes easily from the bone.

  3. Transfer the fish to a hot dish, strain sauce over it, and garnish with lemon and 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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Sole
Is the main protein, cooked gently by steam until its flesh turns opaque and tender.

The step that matters

Steam until the flesh just releases from the bone. Steam cooks the fish gently, but overcooking makes the flesh dry and stringy. Checking that the flesh comes easily from the bone shows it is cooked through while still moist.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes