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Water Souchy

A fish stew made with flounder, peppercorns, parsley, and served with bread and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Water Souchy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Stew the flounders, parsley leaves and roots, and peppercorns in 1 quart of water until the fish are boiled to pieces.

  2. Pulp the cooked fish through a sieve.

  3. In a pot, combine the pulped fish, the cooking liquid, and additional fish if using. Simmer until everything is cooked through.

Serve

  1. Serve in a deep dish with slices of bread and butter on the side.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Parsley + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flounders
Provide the fish body that breaks down into the soup, giving it flesh and flavor.
Butter
Adds richness and fat for flavor, served alongside the stew.
Slices of bread
Soak up the broth and add a starchy, filling element beside the stew.

The step that matters

Pulping the cooked fish through a sieve. Fish boiled until it falls apart still holds bones and skin that must be separated out; pressing the flesh through a sieve removes them and gives the stew a smooth, thickened body.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter):

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Sagefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter. 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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