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Fish Soup

A savory soup made with fish, carrots, turnip, onion, parsley, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Cut the fish into small pieces and fry until rich brown.

Make the soup

  1. Cover the fish with water, using 1 quart for every 1½ pounds of fish.

  2. Add carrot, turnip, onion, parsley, salt, and pepper.

  3. Boil slowly for 1 hour.

  4. Mash the mixture gently through a colander.

  5. Return the liquid to the fire and add a little butter.

Serve

  1. Serve with small bits of toasted bread or croutons in the tureen.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Firm-fleshed fish
Provides the main body and flavour of the soup once simmered and strained.
Butter
Browns the fish at the start and enriches the finished broth with fat.
Carrot
Adds subtle sweetness and body to the broth as it simmers.
Onion
Adds savoury aromatic depth to the broth during the long simmer.

The step that matters

Frying the fish until rich brown. Browning the fish creates Maillard flavour compounds that deepen the broth. Pale fish gives a flatter, less savoury soup.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, fish, carrot, turnip, parsley, pepper, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, fish, carrot, turnip, parsley, pepper, bread. 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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