Skip to main content
Main

Baked Salmon

A baked salmon dish layered with onions, soda biscuits, butter, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and biscuit work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 428 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Baked Salmon

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

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Layer and bake

  1. In a dish, layer the salmon, sliced onions, rolled soda biscuits, and butter alternately until all ingredients are used.

  2. Season the layers with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Bake in the preheated oven until heated through.

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. Onion + biscuittop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together428 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  3. Biscuit + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together841 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Salmon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,481 recipes

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

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 dish and supplies its protein and flavor.
Soda biscuits
Crumbled and layered to soak up juices and add body to the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture as it melts through the layers.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma as they soften during baking.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Asparagusfits about as well
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, biscuit, butter, 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.

You might also like