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Soles, Fricasseed

Soles, Fricassee is a French fish dish of browned soles served in a creamy gravy with lemon and port.

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

Soles, Fricasseed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Fry the soles until nicely browned and drain them well from fat.

  2. Remove all the meat from the small sole and chop it finely.

Make the fish balls

  1. Mix the chopped sole with lemon peel, parsley, grated bread, and seasoning.

  2. Combine the mixture with the yolk of an egg and butter, then form into small balls and fry them.

Finish and serve

  1. Thicken the gravy with 2 teaspoons of flour.

  2. Add port wine, cayenne, and lemon juice.

  3. Add the two soles and the balls to the gravy and simmer gently for 5 minutes.

  4. Serve hot garnished with cut lemon.

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).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 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

Soles
Form the main body of the dish, browned first and then simmered in the gravy.
Egg
Its yolk binds the chopped fish and bread into balls that hold their shape.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the fish mixture, helping it stay moist when fried.
Grated bread
Absorbs moisture and adds body so the fish mixture can be shaped into balls.
Good gravy
Forms the sauce base, and flour thickens it into a coating for the fish.

The step that matters

Frying the soles until nicely browned. Browning builds flavor through the Maillard reaction, and draining well removes excess fat so the dish does not turn greasy in the gravy.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, parsley, bread, pepper, egg, butter, port wine):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, parsley, bread, pepper, egg, butter, port wine. 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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