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Fish Soupe'maigbe

A fish soup made with common fish, vegetables, butter, egg yolks, and a French roll.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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'maigbe

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Clean and wash the fish thoroughly.

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

  3. Strain the mixture through a coarse cloth.

  4. Boil the liquid, covered, for 1 hour.

Finish the soup

  1. Cut some of the vegetables small.

  2. Sauté the cut vegetables in butter.

  3. Simmer the sautéed vegetables in the soup for 1 hour with pepper, salt, and cloves.

  4. Soften the French roll in good broth.

  5. Mix the yolks of 6 eggs with a few crumbs.

  6. Stir the egg yolk mixture into the soup.

  7. Pour the soup over the softened roll before serving.

  8. If using peas, add the pulp and some of the water they were boiled in to achieve the desired consistency.

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

Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the soup and add richness when stirred in.
Butter
Fat that softens and carries flavor from the sautéed vegetables.
French roll
Absorbs broth, becoming soft and giving the soup body.
Fish
Provides the main savory flavor in the broth.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg yolk mixture into the soup. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently; adding them to very hot soup without tempering or constant stirring can cause them to scramble into grainy lumps.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

More fish soup recipes

White 9Lake and Pond 6Water Soucy 6Brown 4Clear 3Russian 3 See all 129 →

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