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Fish Soupe-maigre

A light fish soup made with dace or similar fish, vegetables, butter, and egg yolks, served over a softened French roll.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and sorrel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 317 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fish Soupe-maigre

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Clean and wash the fish thoroughly.

  2. Stew the fish with carrots, lettuce, leeks, onions, and sorrel in enough water to cover them until everything is soft.

  3. Strain the mixture through a coarse cloth and boil the liquid, covered, for 1 hour.

Finish the soup

  1. Prepare some of the vegetables, cut small, and sauté them in butter.

  2. Add the sautéed vegetables to the soup along with pepper, salt, and cloves, and simmer for 30 minutes.

  3. Soften the French roll in the broth.

  4. Mix the egg yolks with a few crumbs and stir them into the soup.

  5. Pour the soup over the softened roll and serve.

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. Lettuce + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Leek + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together112 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together217 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Leek + oniontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,326 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Gives the broth its savoury flavour as it stews down with the vegetables.
Egg yolks
Enriches and thickens the soup, giving it a smoother, richer body.
Butter
Carries flavour and adds richness when the vegetables are sautéed.
French roll
Softens in the broth to give the soup a bread-based body.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg yolks into the soup. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can curdle if the soup is at a hard boil. Keep the soup hot rather than boiling when the yolks go in, and stir steadily so they blend smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, carrot, lettuce, leek, sorrel, butter, pepper):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, carrot, lettuce, leek, sorrel, butter, pepper. 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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