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Common Broth, Maigre

A clear broth made from peas, vegetables, and whiting fish, simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Common Broth, Maigre

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pea stock

  1. Boil peas with water, salt, butter, pepper, nutmeg, and parsley for 4 hours.

  2. After boiling, strain the stock through a fine sieve.

Sweat the vegetables

  1. Slice and sweat carrots, turnips, onions, and celery in butter until evenly colored.

Simmer and strain

  1. Add whiting fish, leeks, 10 quarts of water, and the strained pea stock.

  2. Boil for 3 hours and then strain through a fine sieve again.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 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

Dried peas
Break down during long boiling to give the stock body and a thick, full texture.
Butter
Carries flavor and adds richness, and helps the vegetables brown gently.
Carrots
Sweeten the broth as their sugars caramelize during sweating.
Onions
Provide savory depth as they soften and brown in butter.
Celery
Adds aromatic, savory background flavor to the stock.
Whiting fish
Contributes savory, delicate fish flavor to the broth.

The step that matters

Sweating the vegetables in butter until evenly colored. Gentle browning caramelizes the vegetables' natural sugars and builds deeper flavor. Heat that is too high or uneven can scorch some pieces and make the broth taste bitter.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, nutmeg, parsley, carrot, turnip, onion):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, nutmeg, parsley, carrot, turnip, onion. 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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