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Pilleted Soles a LA Reine

Sole fillets rolled and tied, boiled, then served in a creamy butter‑flour sauce with horseradish and optional parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Pilleted Soles a LA Reine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Fillet the sole and cut the fillets into two parts.

  2. Roll up the fillets and tie them with cotton if necessary.

  3. Place the fillets in a stewpan with boiling salted water just to cover and cook for 10 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. In another stewpan, melt the butter, then add the flour and mix until smooth.

  2. Gradually add hot milk until the sauce reaches a cream-like consistency.

  3. Season the sauce with salt, pepper, and grated horseradish.

Combine and serve

  1. Carefully add the fillets to the sauce, ensuring they are just covered, and simmer for 2 minutes.

  2. Optionally, add chopped parsley 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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Horseradish + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Flour + horseradishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sole
Forms the delicate, flaky main body of the dish once cooked.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and carries flavour through the roux.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a smooth, cream-like sauce.
Hot milk
Hydrates the roux and, as it thickens, makes the sauce creamy.
Grated horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that cuts through the richness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding hot milk to the roux. Adding the milk gradually and keeping it hot lets the starch in the flour swell evenly, giving a smooth sauce without lumps. Cold or rushed milk can cause lumps that are hard to remove.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, cream, pepper, horseradish. 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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