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Soles Stewed in Cream

A stew of soles simmered in sweet rich cream with mace, cayenne, 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

Prepare the fish

  1. Prepare the soles by removing the gills and rinsing them.

  2. Place the soles in boiling salted water and simmer for 2 minutes.

  3. Remove the soles and let them drain.

Stew and serve

  1. In a wide stewpan, add the cream to nearly cover the soles.

  2. Season with mace, cayenne, and salt, then stew the fish gently for 6 to 10 minutes until the flesh separates from the bones.

  3. If desired, boil lemon rind in the cream and add arrow-root mixed with milk for thickening before adding lemon juice.

  4. Dish the fish and stir the lemon juice into the sauce, pouring it over the soles 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 delicate white fish flesh that becomes tender and flakes when gently stewed.
Sweet rich cream
Forms the body of the sauce and adds richness and mouthfeel to the stew.
Arrow-root
Thickens the cream sauce so it becomes smoother and less thin.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and balances its flavor.

The step that matters

Stewing the fish gently. Cream that boils hard can curdle or turn grainy, and fish cooked too vigorously becomes dry and tough. A gentle simmer keeps the sauce smooth and the flesh tender until it separates from the bones.

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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