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Haddock Soup

A soup made from haddock meat, shrimps, parsley, French roll, egg, and thickened with flour and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Haddock Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish balls

  1. Pound the picked shrimps and haddock meat in a mortar.

  2. Add the finely chopped parsley and the soaked French roll crumb.

  3. Incorporate the egg and mix well to form balls.

Make the soup

  1. Stew the two haddocks in broth, seasoning with cayenne and mace.

  2. Pulp the meat of the stewed haddocks through a sieve.

  3. Boil the pulp with parsley, then thicken with flour and butter.

Serve

  1. Serve the soup with the meat balls.

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

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

  2. Haddock + creamtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together181 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Shrimp + meattop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together584 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + macetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Haddock
Forms the main body of the soup and, once pulped, gives it flavour and substance.
Shrimps
Adds sweet, delicate seafood flavour to the pounded fish balls.
French roll
Soaked in cream and crumbed, it binds the fish mixture and keeps the balls tender.
Egg
Binds the pounded fish and crumb mixture so it holds together when shaped into balls.
Flour and butter
Together form a roux that thickens the soup to a smooth, body-rich texture.

The step that matters

Forming the fish balls. The mixture must be pounded and bound with egg and crumb so it holds its shape without becoming stiff or falling apart when cooked in the soup.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shrimp, meat, haddock, parsley, cream, egg, pepper):

  1. Dillfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shrimp, meat, haddock, parsley, cream, egg, pepper. 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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