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Soles Stewed in Cream

Sole fish stewed gently in sweet cream with mace, cayenne, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Soles Stewed in Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the soles by removing the gills and rinsing them.

  2. Bring a pot of salted water to a boil and simmer the soles for 2 minutes.

  3. Remove the soles and let them drain.

Stew and finish

  1. In a wide stewpan, place the soles and cover them with cream.

  2. Season with mace, cayenne, and salt.

  3. Stew the fish gently for 6 to 10 minutes until the flesh separates easily from the bones.

  4. Optionally, boil lemon rind in the cream and add arrow-root mixed with milk for thickening.

  5. Stir in the lemon juice 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Mace + milktop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,346 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  5. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Soles
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and flaky as they gently stew.
Sweet rich cream
Provides moisture and richness, forming the body of the sauce around the fish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and balances its fattiness.
Arrow-root
Thickens the cream sauce to a smoother, more cohesive consistency.

The step that matters

Stew the fish gently. Gentle heat keeps the delicate fish flesh tender and intact, while overheating makes it dry and tough and causes it to break apart. Fish is done when the flesh separates easily from the bones.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, mace, pepper, milk):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Strawberryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, mace, pepper, 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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