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Filets De Sole a LA Cardinal

Sole fillets baked with a lemon‑cream sauce made from fish stock, butter, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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 ↓

Filets De Sole a LA Cardinal

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fish

  1. Skin the soles and fillet them by slipping a knife down the back from head to tail.

  2. Lift the fillets carefully from the bones.

  3. Sprinkle both sides of the fillets with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

  4. Fold the fillets in half.

  5. Lay the folded fillets in a buttered baking dish.

  6. Cover the fillets with buttered paper.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, combine the bones, parsley, mace, onion, celery, and broken bay leaf with 1¼ cups of water or stock.

  2. Simmer the mixture slowly for 15 minutes.

  3. Melt the butter in another pan.

  4. Stir in the flour, seasonings, and lemon juice.

  5. Strain the stock from the bones into the flour mixture.

  6. Add cream to the mixture.

  7. Boil the sauce for 3 minutes.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 15 to 20 minutes.

  2. Lift the fish out of the baking dish to drain.

  3. Brush the fish with the sauce.

  4. Sprinkle the fish with finely minced parsley and lobster coral.

  5. Arrange the fillets on a serving dish, allowing each to rest against the other.

  6. Strain the sauce around the fillets.

  7. Serve.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 flesh that is filleted, folded and baked.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce, giving it a smooth, silky texture.
Flour
Thickens the butter-based sauce so it coats the fish.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and carries flavour from the cooking base.
Fish stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, made from the fish bones and aromatics.
Lobster coral
Adds colour and a rich, briny flavour to the finished garnish.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce for 3 minutes. Flour needs sustained heat to cook out its raw starch taste and to thicken fully. Boiling too briefly leaves the sauce floury, while the cream should be added before boiling to avoid curdling in excess heat.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, cream, lemon, fish, flour, butter, onion):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, cream, lemon, fish, flour, butter, onion. 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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