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Fish Soup; So Named From Prince Bagration

A fish soup made with sole, perch, carp fillets, crayfish, roes, and clarified consomme.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

Fish Soup; So Named From Prince Bagration

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the consomme

  1. Prepare a good consomme.

  2. Make a quenelle of soles with crayfish butter.

Poach the fish

  1. Trim the fillets of sole, perch, and carp, and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  2. After an hour, wash and drain the fillets.

  3. Place them in a sauté pan.

  4. Mark an essence with the bones and trimmings of the fish.

  5. Squeeze the essence through a fine sieve over the fillets.

  6. Boil the fillets slowly for 10 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Pour the cooking liquid into the consomme and clarify it.

  2. Reduce the consomme by one-fifth and pour it into a tureen over the fillets and quenelles.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Chervil + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together774 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Chervil + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together358 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Crayfish + roetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together36 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Crayfish + cherviltop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Fillets of sole
Provide the delicate white flesh that forms the main body of the soup.
Crayfish butter
Adds rich fat and aroma to the soleflesh quenelle.
Bones and trimmings of fish
Release gelatine and flavour into the essence that gives the broth depth.
1 good consomme
Forms the clear, savoury liquid base in which the fish is served.

The step that matters

Clarifying the consomme. Pouring the fish cooking liquid into the consomme and clarifying it must be done gently. Rough boiling breaks up the clarifying raft and leaves the broth cloudy and less clear.

Swap the chervil

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crayfish, butter, fish, roe, parsley, lemon):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Chervilthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crayfish, butter, fish, roe, parsley, lemon. 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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