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Salmon Au Bleu

A salmon dish simmered with port wine, vegetables, herbs, and finished with a butter sauce containing capers, gherkins, and anchovy butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Salmon Au Bleu

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the salmon

  1. Place the salmon slices in a fish kettle.

  2. Add the port wine, sliced carrots, onions, cloves, bay leaves, parsley, thyme, and salt and pepper.

  3. Boil gently until the flesh easily separates from the bone.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the skin from the cooked fish.

  2. Mask the salmon with a good butter sauce mixed with capers, sliced gherkins, and a little anchovy butter.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Salmon
Provides the main protein, which firms and flakes as it cooks gently in the liquid.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the poaching liquid.
Butter sauce
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty coating to the cooked fish.
Capers
Adds a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the rich butter sauce.
Anchovy butter
Adds a savoury, salty depth to the butter sauce.

The step that matters

Boil gently until the flesh easily separates from the bone. At a rolling boil the delicate salmon flesh breaks apart and toughens. A gentle simmer cooks it evenly and keeps the slices intact.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (salmon, port wine, carrot, clove, parsley, thyme, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, port wine, carrot, clove, parsley, thyme, 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.

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