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Olives of Soles

Rolled sole fillets filled with fish forcemeat, battered, fried, and served with benshamelle sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and white wine work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 370 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Olives of Soles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soles

  1. Fillet the soles and wipe them dry.

  2. Wash the inside of each sole with egg white.

  3. Place a little light forcemeat inside each sole and roll them up.

  4. Run a small wooden skewer through each rolled sole.

Batter and fry

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, salt, sweet oil, white wine, and eggs to make a batter.

  2. Dip each sole in the batter.

  3. Heat lard in a pan until boiling and fry the fillets until golden brown.

  4. Drain the fried fillets and serve with benshamelle sauce underneath.

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. Fish + white winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together370 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Fish + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,487 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. White wine + saucetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together819 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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, rolled around the forcemeat filling.
Light forcemeat
Provides a soft, moist filling that keeps the rolls juicy inside.
Egg white
Acts as a binding wash that helps the rolls hold their shape.
Flour
Forms the base of the batter, giving the coating structure once fried.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set into a crisp, golden coating.

The step that matters

Frying the batter-coated rolls. Lard must be boiling hot before the fillets go in, so the batter sets quickly and seals the fish. Oil that is too cool lets the coating soak up fat and turn greasy while the fish overcooks.

“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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