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Salmi of Cheese

A warm cheese sauce made with milk, cheese, flour, mustard, and butter, served over toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Salmi of Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the crumbled cheese and boil for 1 minute.

  3. Stir in the flour mixed with a little milk.

  4. Add the salt and mustard, and cook until thickened.

  5. Remove from heat and stir in the butter.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with nicely browned toast.

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

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

  2. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  3. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

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

  4. Cheese + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,805 recipes

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

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a smooth sauce.
Cheese
Melts into the milk to give the sauce its flavor and body.
Flour
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the sauce a smooth, coating texture.
Butter
Stirred in at the end to add richness and a glossy finish.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the milk. Flour clumps if added dry or to hot liquid without being mixed first. Mixing it with a little milk makes a smooth slurry that thickens the sauce evenly.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, cheese, flour, butter):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Chivefits about as well
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cheese, flour, butter. 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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