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Salmagundie a Second Way

Salmagundie is a dish of pickled herrings, parsley, ham, orange, butter, capers, and oysters.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Salmagundie a Second Way

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the pickled herrings and parsley exceedingly small.

  2. Chop the boiled ham finely.

Assemble and serve

  1. Place a large Seville orange in the center of your dish.

  2. Arrange the chopped ingredients around the orange.

  3. Rub cold butter through a sieve to create curls and place it in lumps on the meat.

  4. Garnish with a sprig of curled parsley 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. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + orangetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together680 recipes

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

  3. Butter + oystertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  4. Ham + oystertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together360 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pickled herrings
Provide salty, tangy, savoury flavour from the pickling.
Boiled ham
Adds savoury, meaty flavour and substance to the dish.
Cold butter
Adds richness and fat, and stays firm when cold so it holds its curled shape.
Seville orange
Serves as the centrepiece, with its sharp citrus aroma lifting the rich ingredients.

The step that matters

Rubbing the cold butter through a sieve. Butter must stay cold so it stays firm and forms fine curls instead of softening and smearing. Warm butter loses its shape and melts into the meat.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, ham, butter, capers, oyster):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, ham, butter, capers, oyster. 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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