Skip to main content
Main

Water Souchet of Soles

A clear broth made from sole fish bones, parsley, mace, and pepper, served with boiled fillets and lemon garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

Water Souchet of Soles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Separate the fillets from the bones of the soles, then divide each fillet in half.

Make the broth

  1. Combine the bones, parsley roots, chopped parsley leaves, mace, peppercorns, and cold water to cover in a stewpan.

  2. Season the mixture with coarse sea salt to taste.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  4. Reduce heat and simmer for 2 to 2.5 hours.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the fillets in a clean stewpan.

  2. Strain the broth over the fillets.

  3. Add minced parsley leaves and shredded parsley roots to the fillets.

  4. Boil the fillets for 15 minutes.

  5. Serve the fish on a hot dish with the broth poured over, garnished with 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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + macetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Mace + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,315 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Soles
Provide the delicate white flesh that becomes the fish pieces and the bones that flavour the broth.
Parsley roots
Add earthy, savoury flavour to the broth and a fresh texture when shredded into the soup.
Peppercorns
Add gentle aromatic heat that infuses the broth during the long simmer.

The step that matters

Simmer the broth gently. A slow, gentle simmer draws flavour and gelatin from the bones without clouding the broth. A hard boil can emulsify fats and make the soup cloudy and greasy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, lemon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, lemon. 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 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes