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Soles with Mushrooms

Soles cooked in a milk and water broth with butter, salt, and lemon, served with mushroom sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Soles with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Poach

  1. In a stewpan or fish kettle, combine milk, water, butter, salt, and lemon juice.

  2. Add the soles and simmer gently until cooked through.

  3. Remove the soles and place them on a cloth to absorb excess liquid.

Serve

  1. Transfer the soles to a dish and pour mushroom sauce over them.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Milk + mushroomtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Milk
Gently flavours the poaching liquid and keeps the delicate fish moist and tender.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the poaching liquid, contributing a smooth mouthfeel.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the fish.

The step that matters

Simmer the soles gently. Holding the liquid at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil keeps the delicate fish flesh tender and intact. Vigorous boiling toughens proteins and can break the fillets apart.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, mushroom, sauce):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, mushroom, sauce. 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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