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Boiled Sole

A boiled sole served with white sauce, egg yolk garnish, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 39% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,895 recipes. The science ↓

Boiled Sole

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and poach

  1. Wash and clean the sole carefully.

  2. Place the sole in a frying pan half full of salted hot water.

  3. Boil gently for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Remove the sole, drain the water, and place it on a dish.

  2. Pour the white sauce over the sole.

  3. Rub the yolk of the egg through a sieve and garnish the dish with it and a little chopped parsley or lobster coral.

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. Sauce + eggtop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,895 recipes

Sauce and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,895 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

Sole
The main fish; gentle poaching firms its flesh and turns it opaque while keeping it moist.
White sauce
Adds moisture and richness over the fish, softening its mild flavour.
Egg
The yolk, pressed through a sieve, adds richness and bright yellow colour as a garnish.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 10 minutes. Keeping the water at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil cooks the delicate fish evenly and keeps its flesh tender and intact instead of tough and breaking apart.

“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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