Skip to main content
Main

Fried Soles

A simple fried fish dish using soles seasoned with salt and pepper and cooked in butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fried Soles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the soles and season with salt and pepper.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat butter in a pan over medium heat.

  2. Fry the soles until golden brown on both sides.

  3. 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. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Soles
The main protein, which becomes tender and flaky when fried.
Butter
Conducts heat in the pan and adds richness and browning to the fish's surface.

The step that matters

Frying the soles until golden brown on both sides. Fish is delicate and can stick or break if moved too early. Letting a side form a crust before turning helps it release cleanly and gives browning flavor. Medium heat lets the fish cook through before the butter burns.

“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.

More fried sole recipes

Fillets 20 See all 66 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes