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Perch Dressed in Water Souchy

A perch cooked in salted water with onion, parsley, peppercorns, and milk, served with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,843 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Perch Dressed in Water Souchy

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the fish

  1. Boil water in a stewpan with salt.

  2. Add the perch, onion rings, parsley, peppercorns, and enough milk to make the water white.

  3. Once the fish is cooked, place it in a deep dish.

Serve

  1. Pour a little of the cooking liquid over the fish, along with the parsley and onions.

  2. Serve with a side of melted butter and additional parsley.

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. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  2. Onion + milktop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Parsley + milktop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,011 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

Perch
The main fish, which turns flaky and tender when gently poached.
Milk
Whitens the cooking water, giving the dish its pale, creamy appearance.
Onion
Adds mild sweetness and aroma to the poaching liquid.

The step that matters

Keeping the water at a gentle simmer. Boiling vigorously toughens fish proteins and can break the flesh apart, so the perch should poach gently until just cooked through.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, milk):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, milk. 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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