Name: Soles Stewed in Cream
Ingredients: 3 or 4 soles; 1 pint cream; ½ teaspoon salt; ¼ teaspoon mace; ¼ teaspoon cayenne; Juice of ½ lemon; 2 teaspoons arrowroot (optional); A little milk (optional)

Why it works: Lemon and arrowroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Soles Stewed in Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fish

Boil the soles in water for 2 minutes.
Stew the fish gently for 6 to 10 minutes until the flesh separates from the bones.

Make the sauce and serve

Dish the fish and stir the lemon juice into the sauce.
If desired, mix the arrowroot with a little milk and stir it into the sauce for thickening before adding the lemon juice.
Serve immediately.

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.

Lemon + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together553 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together19,053 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Mace + milktop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,346 recipes

Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).
Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together29,399 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Arrowroot + milktop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together817 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Soles: The main protein, which firms and flakes as it cooks in the gentle stew.
Cream: Forms the rich, smooth body of the sauce and adds moisture and fat.
Arrowroot: Thickens the cream sauce into a glossy, smooth consistency when stirred in.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and balances its flavor.

The step that matters

Stirring in the arrowroot before the lemon juice. Arrowroot thickens best when stirred into a warm liquid and mixed smoothly beforehand, so it doesn't clump. Adding acid afterward keeps the sauce from thinning or curdling, since its thickening is weakened by acid when heated too long.

Swap the arrowroot

The recipe marks arrowroot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, mace, lemon, milk):

Potatofits about as well
Arrowrootthe original
Leekfits about as well
Asparagusfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, mace, lemon, milk. 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.

Lemon Sauce236 recipes

Arrowroot Gruel37 recipes

Tomato Soup526 recipes

Brown Bread461 recipes

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Soles Stewed in Cream