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To Bake Salmon

A salmon baked with butter, optional oysters, and a sauce of port wine, ketchup, lemon juice, or anchovy sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

To Bake Salmon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. If using a small fish, turn the tail to the mouth and skewer it.

  2. Stuff the belly with forcemeat, or dip slices of a large fish in egg and then in forcemeat.

  3. Place bits of butter around the salmon and add oysters if desired.

Bake

  1. Baste the fish occasionally with butter.

  2. When one side is brown, carefully turn it over.

  3. Once the second side is brown, the fish is done.

Serve

  1. Serve carefully with all the juices from the baking dish.

  2. For sauce, melt butter and mix with port wine, ketchup, and lemon juice, or serve with anchovy sauce.

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. Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Anchovy + saucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Ketchup + anchovytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together479 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Oyster + anchovytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together603 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Salmon + oystertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together672 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 flakes into moist pieces when cooked through.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and browns the fish as it bastes the surface.
Forcemeat
Fills the belly or coats the slices, adding moisture and savoury flavour around the fish.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter sauce.

The step that matters

Turning the fish. Turn only when the first side is well browned so the skin or surface holds together. Turning too early tears the flesh and lets juices escape, leaving the fish dry and broken.

“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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