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Fish Soup

A savory soup made with onions, butter, fish, herbs, and spices, thickened with butter and flour.

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 ↓

Fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Sauté the onions in butter in a stewpan.

  2. Cut the fish into pieces, keeping the prime middle part for frying, and add to the butter and onions.

  3. Shake over the fire for a few minutes, then add boiling water and cover.

  4. Once boiling, skim carefully and add the herbs and spices.

  5. Let it boil gently for two hours, then strain the soup.

Thicken and finish

  1. In a clean stewpan, thicken the soup with butter rubbed in flour.

  2. Fry the middle pieces of fish cut into about 2-inch pieces.

  3. Ten minutes before serving, add the fried fish and fish force-meat balls to 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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,077 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eels, soles, or plaice
Form the body of the soup, releasing flavour and gelatin into the broth as they simmer.
Onions
Sweeten and deepen the broth's flavour when softened in butter at the start.
Butter
Carries the onion flavour and, with flour, forms a roux that thickens the soup.
Flour
Thickens the strained soup when cooked with butter into a roux.

The step that matters

Thickening with butter rubbed in flour. Adding the flour-butter mixture to hot liquid without cooking it out can leave raw floury taste and lumps. Smoothing it into the soup and simmering gently lets the starch swell evenly and thicken properly.

Swap the onion

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

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

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