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Soles Stewed in Cream

A stew of fresh soles simmered in sweet cream with mace, cayenne, salt, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 Stewed in Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the fish

  1. Simmer the soles in boiling salted water for 2 minutes.

  2. Lift the soles out and let them drain.

Stew in cream

  1. Place the soles in a wide stewpan.

  2. Cover them with sweet rich cream.

  3. Add pounded mace, cayenne pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  4. Stew the fish gently for 6 to 10 minutes, until the flesh easily separates from the bones.

  5. Stir in the juice of half a lemon 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. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Mace + milktop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,346 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  5. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

Mace and pepper 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 flaky fish flesh that becomes tender and separates from the bones when stewed.
Sweet rich cream
Forms the richly fatty sauce that gently coats the fish and keeps it moist.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and balances its fattiness.
Pounded mace
Contributes warm, aromatic flavour to the cream sauce.

The step that matters

Stew the fish gently. Cream and fish proteins can curdle or toughen if boiled hard, and fish turns dry and rubbery when overcooked. A gentle simmer for 6 to 10 minutes lets the flesh turn opaque and separate easily from the bones while the sauce stays smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Strawberryfits about as well

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

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