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Bouillabaisse

Bouillabaisse is a fish soup made with carp, perch, whiting, gurnet, tench, mussels, onions, lemon, parsley root, and saffron.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 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 ↓

Bouillabaisse

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Wash, scale, and clean the fish; cut them into nice pieces and place them in a saucepan.

Make the broth

  1. Add the onions with cloves stuck in them, and pour in enough cold water or fish stock to cover the fish.

  2. Add the white wine and saffron, then boil on a brisk fire for 15 minutes.

  3. Scrape and add the parsley root to the soup, then boil quickly.

Serve

  1. Soak slices of bread in the soup and place them in a deep dish.

  2. Pour the soup through a sieve and arrange the pieces of fish nicely in the dish.

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. Lemon + saffrontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together538 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Saffron + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

Fish (carp, perch, whiting, gurnet, tench)
Forms the body of the dish and flakes into the broth as it cooks.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic flavour to the broth as they cook.
White wine
Adds acidity that brightens the broth and balances the rich fish flavour.
Saffron
Gives the broth its distinctive golden colour and floral aroma.

The step that matters

Boil on a brisk fire for 15 minutes. Boiling too gently or too long can leave the fish tough or broken up. A steady, controlled boil cooks the fish through while the broth extracts flavour and saffron colour.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (whiting, lemon, pepper, fish, white wine, saffron, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against whiting, lemon, pepper, fish, white wine, saffron, parsley. 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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