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Salmon Timbales

A steamed custard-like dish of salmon, milk, bread crumbs, eggs, and butter, served with a lemony sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Salmon Timbales

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Mince the salmon finely.

  2. Cook the bread or cracker crumbs and milk in a saucepan until thick; then cool.

  3. Combine the cooled mixture with the minced salmon.

  4. Add the beaten yolks and season to taste.

  5. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

Steam

  1. Fill buttered molds ⅔ full and steam for 30 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the lemon juice, yolks of 2 eggs, boiling water, flour, salt, and cayenne.

  3. Cook slowly until thickened like custard.

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. Lemon + peppertop 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Milk + breadtop 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

Eggs
Bind the mixture and set into a firm, sliceable structure when steamed.
Salmon
Provides the main body and flavor of the timbales.
Bread or cracker crumbs
Absorb the milk and help bind the salmon into a tender mass.
Milk
Adds moisture so the cooked crumbs form a soft, creamy base.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded flavor to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it holds together rather than running thin.

The step that matters

Cook the sauce slowly. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat as their proteins set. Too much heat too fast can curdle the yolks, leaving the sauce grainy instead of smooth and custard-like.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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