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Stewed Salmon

A salmon stew cooked with stock, carrots, onions, thyme, bay leaves, nutmeg, peppercorns, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,563 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Stewed Salmon

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scale and wash the salmon.

  2. Lard the fish finely and place it in a stewpan.

Stew

  1. Add stock, carrots, onions, thyme, bay leaves, nutmeg, peppercorns, and salt.

  2. Simmer gently for about 2 hours.

Finish the sauce

  1. Remove the fish and strain the sauce, removing any fat.

  2. Reduce the sauce to a glaze and pour it over the fish.

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. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,907 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Salmon
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently until it becomes tender in the stock.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the stock, which becomes the base of the sauce.
Onions
Contribute savory depth and aroma to the stock as it simmers.
Clear stock
Provides the liquid that cooks the fish and is reduced into the glaze.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for about 2 hours. At a rapid boil, the proteins in the fish toughen and break apart, so the stock should only barely tremble to keep the salmon moist and intact.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (salmon, carrot, thyme, nutmeg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, carrot, thyme, nutmeg. 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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