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Salmon Collops

Thin slices of salmon seasoned, pan‑fried, and served with a herb‑béchamel sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Salmon Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the salmon

  1. Cut the salmon into thin slices.

  2. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Fry in a pan with a little butter until cooked.

  4. Place the salmon in a dish.

Make the herb sauce

  1. Boil a spoonful each of fennel, mint, and parsley for five minutes, then chop finely.

  2. Mix the chopped herbs with ½ pint of béchamel and a little glaze.

  3. Season the sauce with coarse sea salt, a pinch of cayenne, and a squeeze of lemon.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Fennel + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together625 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Fennel + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together723 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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 is cooked through by frying.
Béchamel sauce
Adds creamy moisture and body that binds the herbs to the fish.
Butter
Fat for frying the salmon, adding richness and light browning.
Fennel
Adds a mild aniseed aroma to the herb sauce.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the salmon until cooked. Salmon dries out and turns tough when overcooked, so it should be cooked just through and removed promptly from the pan.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, pepper, butter, fennel, parsley, sauce, 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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