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Bouillabaisse

A French fish stew made with mixed small fish, onions, tomatoes, spices, and saffron, simmered in broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Bouillabaisse

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. In a stew-pan, combine the mixed fish, onions, tomatoes, carrot, lime slices, cloves, peppercorns, garlic, lime peel, saffron, salt, and capsicum.

  2. Add the salad oil, Chablis, and cold water to the pan.

  3. Boil the mixture for about 30 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, stir in the chopped parsley.

  2. Serve the fish in a deep dish with some broth around it, and serve the remaining broth 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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Lime + saffrontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together112 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Tomato + saffrontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together369 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Mixed small fish
Provide the main body of flesh that flavours and thickens the broth as it cooks.
Saffron
Gives the broth its distinctive golden colour and a floral aroma.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body, rounding out the broth's flavour.
Onions
Build sweetness and savoury depth as they soften in the broth.
Chablis
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the broth.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for about 30 minutes. A steady boil extracts flavour from the fish, vegetables and aromatics into the liquid, but a violent boil can break up delicate fish and cloud the broth. Keep it at a gentle, steady simmer-level boil so the fish stays intact.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, onion, tomato, carrot, lime, garlic, saffron):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Corianderfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, onion, tomato, carrot, lime, garlic, saffron. 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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