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Kippered Salmon Toast

A toast topped with kippered salmon and a butter‑flour‑milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Kippered Salmon Toast

Oven, in the book's wordsA medium oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salmon

  1. Cut the kippered salmon into six squares.

  2. Boil the salmon slowly in one pint of water for 20 minutes, keeping the fish intact.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pot, pour in the milk, add butter, pepper, and salt to taste.

  2. Thicken the milk mixture with flour, then bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Pour the thickened sauce over buttered toast and serve with the salmon on top, garnished with parsley.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Kippered salmon
Provides the main flavour and the fish that is served on top of the toast.
Milk
Forms the base of the sauce, adding creaminess and body.
Flour
Thickens the milk so the sauce coats the toast instead of running off.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth mouthfeel.
Bread
Acts as the base that soaks up the sauce while the butter helps it brown lightly.

The step that matters

Thickening the milk with flour. Flour must be whisked in smoothly and the milk brought to a boil so starch can swell and thicken the sauce. Adding flour directly to hot liquid without whisking can form lumps that stay in the sauce.

“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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