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Puree of Sorrel with Tench

A sorrel puree soup with tench fish, vegetables, and a butter‑flour roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorrel and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 112 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Puree of Sorrel with Tench

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sorrel

  1. In a stewpan, stir the sorrel with ½ cup of water over medium heat for 10 minutes.

  2. Drain the sorrel and pass it through a fine sieve into a bowl.

Make the broth

  1. In a clean stewpan, melt 2 tablespoons of butter and fry the minced carrots, onion, leek, and celery root until lightly browned.

  2. Pour in 3 pints of boiling water.

  3. Add mushrooms, parsley, cloves, salt, and the tench pieces.

  4. Boil gently until the fish is cooked.

  5. Drain and strain the broth.

Finish the soup

  1. In another stewpan, mix 1 tablespoon of flour and 1 tablespoon of butter over medium heat until well combined.

  2. Stir in the sorrel puree.

  3. Gradually add the fish cooking liquor, stirring until it boils.

  4. Remove from heat.

  5. Add the boned and skinned tench fillets.

  6. Thicken with beaten egg yolks mixed with a little broth, stirring gently without boiling until thickened.

  7. Serve the puree in a soup tureen.

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. Sorrel + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together112 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Sorrel + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together234 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

Sorrel
Gives the soup its tangy, acidic flavour and green colour, and thickens into a puree when sieved.
Tench
Provides the main protein, cooked in the broth and then added as tender fillets.
Egg yolks
Thicken the soup gently as they set, giving it a smooth, creamy body.
Flour
Combined with butter to form a roux that helps thicken the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour when frying the vegetables and making the roux.
Onion
Builds a savoury, sweet base of flavour when browned with carrot, leek and celery root.

The step that matters

Thickening with egg yolks. If the mixture boils after the yolks go in, they can scramble and curdle, leaving the soup grainy. Stirring gently over low heat lets the yolks thicken it smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sorrel, carrot, leek, celery, butter, mushroom, parsley):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sorrel, carrot, leek, celery, butter, mushroom, 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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