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Soup

Craw-fish or Prawn Soup

A soup made with whitings, eel, and either crawfish or prawns, flavored with pepper, mace, ginger, parsley, onion, thyme, cloves, and vinegar.

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 ↓

Craw-fish or Prawn Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil the whitings and eel in enough water to cover them.

  2. Skim the surface to remove impurities.

  3. Add whole pepper, mace, ginger, parsley, onion, thyme, and cloves.

  4. Boil until the mixture becomes a mash.

Add the shellfish

  1. Pick the crawfish or prawns and pound the shells.

  2. Boil the shells with a little water and vinegar.

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

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

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

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

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Ginger + thymetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together421 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Whitings
Their flesh breaks down during boiling, giving the broth body and a fish flavour.
Eel
Its fat and gelatin enrich the broth, adding body and a rounder mouthfeel.
Crawfish or prawns
Their shells release flavour and colour into the liquid when boiled.

The step that matters

Skimming the surface. Skimming removes foam and impurities that rise as the fish boils. Removing them keeps the broth clear and stops off-flavours from spreading through the soup.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (whiting, fish, pepper, ginger, parsley, onion, thyme):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Fennelfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against whiting, fish, pepper, ginger, parsley, onion, thyme. 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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