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Salmon Pie

A baked pie with salmon, lobster, butter, and lemon rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 ↓

Salmon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Clean the salmon and season it with nutmeg, coarse sea salt, and black pepper.

  2. Line a pie dish with the pie crust and add some pieces of butter.

  3. Lay the seasoned salmon in the dish.

Make the lobster layer

  1. Chop the lobster flesh roughly and bruise the remainder in a mortar.

  2. Mix the bruised lobster with a sufficient quantity of rich melted butter.

  3. Pour the lobster mixture over the salmon and add shredded lemon rind.

Bake

  1. Cover the pie with a top crust and bake at 400°F (200°C) until well cooked.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Salmon + lobstertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together313 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Salmon
Forms the main body of the pie and becomes flaky and tender as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and melts to coat the fish and lobster.
Lobster flesh
Provides sweet, delicate seafood flavour and texture to the filling.
Pie crust
Encloses the filling and gives the pie its structure and browned top.

The step that matters

Bake until well cooked. Salmon cooks quickly and can dry out if overbaked, while underbaking leaves the fish unsafe to eat. The cook should judge doneness by the fish flaking easily at its thickest point.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (salmon, pepper, butter, lobster, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, pepper, butter, lobster, lemon. 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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