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Creamed Salmon

A baked salmon dish topped with bread crumbs and butter, served with a white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Creamed Salmon

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. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

Assemble and bake

  1. Flake the salmon and layer it in a dish with the white sauce, seasoning with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Cover the top with bread crumbs and dot with butter.

  3. Bake until golden brown.

Make the white sauce

  1. For the white sauce, melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a saucepan.

  2. Once bubbling, stir in 2 tablespoons of flour.

  3. Gradually add 1 pint of heated milk, stirring until smooth.

Serve

  1. Serve the creamed salmon with buttered crackers, browned delicately in the oven.

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. Butter + milktop 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. Flour + milktop 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

Salmon
Provides the main body and flaky texture of the dish.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a smooth, stable white sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor, and helps the bread crumbs brown.
Milk
Supplies the liquid that makes the white sauce creamy and moist.
Bread crumbs
Form a golden, crisp topping when baked.

The step that matters

Adding the milk to the flour and butter. Add the heated milk gradually while stirring. The flour's starch swells as the sauce heats and thickens it, and adding liquid all at once can trap dry lumps of flour 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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