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Olives of Soles

Battered and fried sole fillets rolled with light forcemeat, served with bechamel 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 fish

  1. Fillet the soles.

  2. Wipe the fillets dry.

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

  4. Place a little light forcemeat inside each sole.

  5. Roll the soles up.

  6. Secure the rolls with a small wooden skewer.

Make the batter

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

Fry and serve

  1. Dip each rolled sole into the batter.

  2. Heat lard in a pan until boiling.

  3. Fry the fillets until golden brown.

  4. Drain the fried fillets.

  5. Serve the fillets with bechamel 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
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked tender inside a crisp golden coating.
Egg white
Gives the inside of the sole a thin coating that helps the forcemeat hold in place.
Flour
Forms the structure of the batter, which sets and crisps as it fries.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set and brown when fried.
Sweet oil
Adds fat to the batter, promoting a tender, crisp coating.

The step that matters

Frying the rolled fillets. Lard must be boiling before the battered fillets go in, so the coating seals quickly and does not absorb excess fat. Too cool a pan leads to greasy, soggy batter and an undercooked fish centre.

“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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