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Catfish Soup

A soup made from catfish, milk, flour, butter, eggs, parsley, and Boston crackers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Catfish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Cover the fish with cold water and stew gently until the flesh slips easily from the bones.

  2. Remove from heat, pick out and discard the bones, then chop the fish.

  3. Strain the cooking liquid and return it to the pot.

Make the soup

  1. Stir in the floured butter, seasoning, and parsley.

  2. Boil for 2 minutes.

  3. Pour the hot milk over the beaten eggs in a separate vessel.

  4. Combine the egg mixture with the fish soup and strain.

Serve

  1. Line a tureen with the soaked and buttered Boston crackers.

  2. Pour the soup over the crackers.

  3. Serve with sliced lemon.

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

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

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

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Catfish
Provides the main protein and flavour, and the flaked flesh that gives the soup its body.
Milk
Adds richness and creaminess, and softens the crackers when heated.
Eggs
Thicken the soup gently when blended with hot milk and combined with the broth.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the cooking liquid when cooked with the butter.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and smooth flavour, and carries the flour into the soup.

The step that matters

Tempering the eggs. Adding hot liquid straight into eggs can scramble them. Pouring the hot milk over the beaten eggs in a separate vessel first warms them gradually, so the mixture blends smoothly into the soup and thickens it without curdling.

“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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