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Cooked Canned Salmon

A dish of canned salmon mixed with mashed potatoes, onion, and herbs, formed into fishballs and fried in butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Cooked Canned Salmon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salmon

  1. Heat the can of salmon in a kettle of hot water for about 20 minutes.

Make the butter sauce

  1. In a bowl, make a nice mixture of butter by melting it and mixing in chopped parsley and finely chopped hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Place the salad onto a dish and pour the butter mixture over it.

Form and fry

  1. In another bowl, mix the drained salmon with cold mashed potatoes, chopped onion, pepper, salt, and thyme.

  2. Form the mixture into fishballs and dip them into beaten eggs.

  3. Fry the fishballs in hot butter until golden brown.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Parsley + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Salmon
Provides the main flavour and protein that forms the body of the fishballs.
Cold mashed potatoes
Adds starch and body so the mixture holds together when shaped.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set when cooked, helping the fishballs hold their shape.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps the outside brown when frying.
Onion
Adds aroma and savoury sweetness to the mixture.

The step that matters

Fry the fishballs in hot butter until golden brown. If the butter is not hot enough, the fishballs absorb grease and steam instead of browning, and they can fall apart. Frying in hot fat sets the egg coating and browns the surface through the Maillard reaction.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (salmon, butter, parsley, egg, potato, pepper, thyme):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, butter, parsley, egg, potato, pepper, thyme. 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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