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A Nice Breakfast Dish

Lemon sole fillets rolled and simmered in milk and water, thickened with flour and butter, served with parsley or shrimp sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

A Nice Breakfast Dish

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the fish

  1. Roll up each fillet of lemon sole.

  2. Place the fillets in a saucepan and cover with equal parts milk and water.

  3. Add a little coarse sea salt.

  4. Simmer gently for 10 minutes.

  5. Carefully remove the fish to a dish.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Thicken the liquid with flour and butter.

  2. To make a sauce, add either chopped parsley or shrimps.

  3. Pour the sauce over the fish and serve hot.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

Flour and butter 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

Lemon sole
Provides the delicate white flesh that is the main component of the dish.
Flour
Thickens the poaching liquid into a sauce as it cooks with the butter.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, adding smoothness and a rich mouthfeel.
Milk
Forms the creamy base of the poaching liquid, adding richness and body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 10 minutes. Gentle simmering keeps the delicate fish tender and intact; a hard boil toughens the proteins and breaks the fillets apart.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon sole, milk, flour, butter):

  1. Capersfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Cinnamonfits less well
  4. Jalapenofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon sole, milk, flour, butter. 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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