Skip to main content
Main

Soup, Fish

A fish soup made with conger eel, haddock, onion, garlic, herbs, mace, water, cream, lemon juice, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Soup, Fish

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Cut the conger eel into small pieces.

  2. Remove the fillets from the haddock.

  3. Chop the onion and add it to a pot with the eel, haddock, cloves, herbs, mace, and water.

Make the broth

  1. Bring to a boil and simmer for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the broth and return it to the pot.

Finish

  1. Stir in the cream and lemon juice.

  2. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt to taste.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Haddock + creamtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together181 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Conger eel
Gives the soup its main body and rich fish flavour as it simmers.
Haddock
Adds delicate fish flavour and body to the broth.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the finished soup.
Onion
Contributes aromatic sweetness and depth to the broth.

Swap the mace

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

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

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

More fish soup recipes

White 9Lake and Pond 6Water Soucy 6Brown 4Clear 3Russian 3 See all 129 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesBoiled HaddockBoiled Haddock10 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes