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Steamed Sole

Steamed sole fillets cooked in butter, served hot with toast or bread, optionally with lemon and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Steamed Sole

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter two plates.

  2. Place one plate over a saucepan of boiling water.

  3. Lay one fillet of fish on the plate and spread with Marmite butter.

Steam

  1. Cover with the second fillet and place it on the other greased plate.

  2. Steam for 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with toast or bread spread with Marmite butter, adding a few drops of lemon and salt if desired.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Lemon + breadtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sole fillets
Delicate flesh that turns opaque and flakes as its proteins set with gentle heat.
Marmite butter
Fat that carries savoury flavour and keeps the fish moist as it steams.

The step that matters

Steam for 20 minutes. Sole is thin and delicate, so the timing matters. Too little steaming leaves the flesh translucent and unset, while too much dries it out and makes it tough and chalky.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, bread):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread. 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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