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Boiled Salmon or Halibut

A whole fish, salted and baked in milk, served with a homemade Hollandaise sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Boiled Salmon or Halibut

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fish

  1. Dip the fish in boiling water and scrape it clean.

  2. Rub the fish with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  3. Place the fish in a pan and pour milk over it until it is ½ inch deep.

Bake

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for about an hour, basting with the milk.

  2. Let the milk cook away toward the end.

Make the Hollandaise and serve

  1. For the Hollandaise sauce, rub the butter to a cream, add the egg yolks one at a time, and beat well.

  2. Add lemon juice, salt, and cayenne pepper to the mixture.

  3. Just before serving, add boiling water and stir rapidly until it thickens like custard.

  4. Pour the sauce around the fish on the platter.

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

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

  3. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

  4. Fish + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Sauce + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sauce and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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 or halibut
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking gently in milk to stay moist and tender.
Butter
Creates the rich, creamy base of the sauce and adds fat for smooth texture.
Egg yolks
Emulsify with the butter and set into a custard-like sauce as they are heated.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and balances the butter.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling water to the Hollandaise. The egg yolks thicken only when gently heated, and stirring rapidly while adding the hot water helps them set smoothly like a custard instead of curdling or staying thin.

“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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