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Fish Soup E-mai Gre

A fish soup made with dace or roach, carrots, lettuces, leeks, onions, sorrel, butter, pepper, salt, cloves, and a French roll.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and sorrel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 317 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fish Soup E-mai Gre

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Clean and wash the fish thoroughly.

Make the broth

  1. Stew the fish with large carrots, half the number of lettuces, a handful of leeks, 4 onions, and a handful of sorrel in enough water to cover them until everything is soft.

  2. Strain the mixture through a coarse cloth.

  3. Boil the liquid, covered, for 1 hour.

Finish and serve

  1. Prepare some of the previously mentioned vegetables, cut them small, and sauté them in butter.

  2. Simmer the sautéed vegetables in the soup for 1 hour.

  3. Season with pepper, salt, and a few cloves.

  4. Soak a rasped French roll in the broth before serving.

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. Lettuce + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Leek + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together112 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together217 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Leek + oniontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,326 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuces
Adds body and a mild, savoury vegetable flavour to the broth.
Butter
Carries flavour and browns the vegetables before they join the soup.
French roll
Soaks up the broth and turns the soup into a thicker, bread-based dish.
Sorrel
Contributes a sharp, acidic note that brightens the broth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, carrot, lettuce, leek, sorrel, butter, pepper):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, carrot, lettuce, leek, sorrel, butter, 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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