Skip to main content
Main

Soles Stewed in Cream

A stew of fresh soles cooked gently in rich cream with mace, cayenne, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 the fish

  1. Remove the gills from the soles and place them in boiling salted water for 2 minutes.

  2. Lift the soles out and let them drain.

Stew in cream

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

  2. Season with mace, cayenne, and salt.

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

  4. If desired, boil some lemon rind in the cream and mix arrow‑root with a little milk to thicken the sauce before adding lemon juice.

  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
Provide the delicate white fish that flakes and separates from the bones when stewed gently.
Rich cream
Forms the richly flavoured sauce and keeps the fish moist during gentle stewing.
Arrow-root
Thickens the cream sauce to a smoother, silkier consistency when mixed with milk.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and balances its heaviness.

The step that matters

Stew the fish gently. Gentle heat lets the flesh cook through and separate from the bones without toughening or breaking apart. Rich cream can curdle or scorch if it boils hard, so keep it at a low simmer.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, pepper, lemon, milk):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, pepper, lemon, 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes