Skip to main content
Main

Soups and Broths

A flounder soup made with fish, herbs, and a fried bread roll, thickened with flour and served in a tureen.

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

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 ↓

Soups and Broths

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Clean the flounders.

  2. Place the cleaned flounders in the water used to boil the fish.

  3. Add lemon peel, sweet herbs, mace, horseradish, crust of bread, parsley, and fish bones.

  4. Cover tightly.

  5. Simmer until reduced to 2 quarts.

  6. Strain the mixture.

  7. Add vermicelli.

  8. Bring to a gentle boil.

Make the filling and roll

  1. Fry a hollow roll in butter.

  2. Pull the fish meat into small slices.

  3. Place the sliced fish in a saucepan with a few spoonfuls of soup.

  4. Add a little flour, butter, pepper, and salt.

  5. Mix until thick.

  6. Fill the fried roll with the mixture.

Serve

  1. Pour the soup into a tureen.

  2. Add the roll to the tureen.

  3. Serve.

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. Horseradish + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Lemon + horseradishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Flounders
Provide the main body of fish meat and flavour for the soup and filling.
Vermicelli
Adds starchy body and a little substance to the soup.
Flour
Thickens the sliced fish mixture so it holds together in the roll.
Butter
Browns the hollow roll when frying and adds richness to the filling.

The step that matters

Mix until thick. Flour must be cooked in the hot mixture long enough to thicken smoothly; adding it without stirring can leave lumps and a raw floury taste.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, lemon, horseradish, parsley, butter, flour, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, lemon, horseradish, parsley, butter, flour, pepper. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesFried FishFried Fish120 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipesScalloped CodScalloped Cod69 recipes