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A baked sole dish with onion, bay leaves, allspice, parsley, thyme, white wine, and capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Baked

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Cut the sole into pieces like cutlets.

  2. Butter a pan and lay in the sole.

  3. Dry the sole, flour it, and season well.

Bake and finish

  1. Add sliced onion, bay leaves, allspice, parsley, thyme, and white wine.

  2. Bake the sole until cooked through.

  3. Thicken the sauce with flour and butter.

  4. Add capers to the sauce before serving.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Allspice + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,077 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Allspice + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sole
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking into flaky, tender pieces.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the fish brown lightly in the pan.
Flour
Coats the fish and later thickens the sauce for body.
White wine
Adds acidity and moisture that flavours the sauce as it cooks.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts the richness of the butter sauce.

The step that matters

Bake the sole until cooked through. Fish protein sets and turns opaque at moderate heat, and overcooking squeezes out moisture, making the flesh dry and firm. Pull it once it flakes easily.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, pepper, allspice, parsley, thyme, white wine):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, allspice, parsley, thyme, white wine. 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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