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Water Souchy

A fish broth made with fresh fish, herbs, and butter, served with bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Water Souchy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Remove the skins, heads, and bones from the fish, discarding the eyes.

  2. Put all the skins and trimmings into a saucepan with the water and bring to a boil.

  3. Add the parsley stalks, onion, carrot, celery, herbs, and spices to the saucepan.

  4. Boil the mixture for one hour.

  5. Strain the mixture and return the liquid to the saucepan.

Finish and serve

  1. Cut the fish flesh into neat pieces.

  2. Add the fish pieces to the saucepan.

  3. Add finely chopped parsley, salt, pepper, and butter to the saucepan.

  4. Boil gently for ten minutes.

  5. Serve with brown bread.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh fish
Provides the main flavour and the flesh that becomes the finished dish.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the finished broth.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and depth to the stock as it simmers.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for one hour. A long, steady simmer extracts flavour and gelatin from the skins and bones. Boiling hard can cloud the liquid and make it greasy, so keep it at a gentle simmer.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, parsley, onion, carrot, celery, clove, butter):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, parsley, onion, carrot, celery, clove, 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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