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Fish Soup

A broth of eels, soles or plaice simmered with onions, butter, herbs, and thickened with butter and flour, finished with fried fish.

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

Prepare the base

  1. Score and finely chop the onions.

  2. Sauté the onions in butter in a stewpan.

  3. Cut the fish into pieces, keeping the heads and tails for frying.

  4. Add the fish pieces to the onions and butter; shake over the fire for a few minutes.

Make the soup

  1. Pour in boiling water and cover.

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

  3. Let it boil gently for two hours.

  4. Strain the soup into a clean stewpan.

  5. Thicken the soup with butter rubbed in flour.

Fry and serve

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

  2. 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

Onions
Softened in butter, they build the sweet, savoury base of the soup.
Eels, soles, or plaice
Their flesh and bones release flavour and body into the boiling water.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and rubbed into flour it thickens the soup.
Flour
Combined with butter, it forms a roux that thickens the strained soup.

The step that matters

Skimming after the boil. Skimming foam as the water first boils removes impurities that would otherwise cloud the soup and taste bitter or scummy.

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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