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Soles, with Cream Sauce

Sole fillets simmered in cream with sea salt, cayenne, mace, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Soles, with Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Skin, wash, and fillet the soles, dividing each fillet into 2 pieces.

  2. Soak the fillets in cold saltwater, then gradually bring to a boil.

Make the sauce and cook

  1. Once boiling, remove the fish and place in a clean saucepan.

  2. Cover the fish with cream and add the seasonings.

  3. Simmer gently for 10 minutes, then stir in the lemon juice just before serving.

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. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Mace + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,009 recipes
  4. Mace + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,315 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Pepper + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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 main fish fillets that cook gently in the cream.
Cream
Forms the richly flavoured sauce that coats and moistens the fish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 10 minutes. Cream can curdle or separate if it boils hard, and fish becomes dry and firm if overcooked. A gentle simmer keeps the cream smooth and the fish tender.

Swap the mace

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

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

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