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Brown Fish Soup

A soup of white fish simmered in water, thickened with brown gravy and flour, seasoned with coarse sea salt, served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,668 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Brown Fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil white fish in 2 quarts of water until the bones and meat release their strength.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Add 1 quart of good brown gravy from beef.

  4. Thicken slightly with flour.

  5. Season with coarse sea salt.

Serve

  1. Serve with fried bread in the soup.

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. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Fish + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Flour and bread barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,383 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

White fish
Adds savory flavor and body to the broth as its bones and meat cook down.
Brown gravy
Adds deep beefy flavor and a rich brown color to the soup.
Flour
Thickens the broth slightly as its starch swells with heat.

The step that matters

Thicken slightly with flour. Flour starch only thickens when it is fully mixed into the hot liquid and heated, so it swells evenly. Adding it unmixed or too little heat can leave lumps or a raw, pasty taste.

“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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