Skip to main content
Main

Fish Pudding

A steamed salmon pudding with a creamy sauce, garnished with lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fish Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break up the drained salmon finely and discard the bones.

  2. In a bowl, combine the salmon, beaten eggs, bread crumbs, cayenne, salt, and melted butter.

Steam

  1. Pour the mixture into a mold and steam for 1 hour.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, thicken the milk with flour and butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the beaten egg, salt, and pepper, then add salmon juice to achieve a pink color.

Serve

  1. Serve the pudding with the sauce and garnish with lemon.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Salmon
Provides the main flesh and flavor of the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set firm when steamed.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding a tender, sliceable body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce with butter.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the pudding and the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the beaten egg into the sauce. Egg proteins set at moderate heat and can scramble into lumps if the sauce is too hot or the egg is added too quickly. Stir steadily over gentle heat so the sauce stays smooth.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (salmon, egg, bread, pepper, butter, milk, flour):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Coconutfits less well
  4. Avocadofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, egg, bread, pepper, butter, milk, flour. 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 pudding recipes

Scandinavian 4 See all 95 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesSalmon SaladSalmon Salad155 recipesSalmon CroquettesSalmon Croquettes129 recipes