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To Drefs a Jowl of Pickled Salmon

A jowl of pickled salmon simmered in a sauce of vinegar, white wine, butter, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

To Drefs a Jowl of Pickled Salmon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salmon

  1. Soak the pickled salmon in fresh water overnight.

  2. Place the salmon in a large stew pan.

  3. Season the salmon with whole pepper, mace in a muslin rag, onion, bruised nutmeg, sweet herbs, parsley, and lemon peel.

  4. Add vinegar, white wine, and butter rolled in flour to the pan.

  5. Cover the pan.

  6. Simmer over low heat for 15 minutes.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Carefully remove the salmon from the pan.

  2. Place the salmon in a dish.

  3. Set the dish over hot water.

  4. Cover the dish.

  5. Boil the sauce until thick.

  6. Remove the spices, onion, and herbs from the sauce.

  7. Pour the sauce over the salmon.

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

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

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

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

  4. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  5. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Pickled salmon
Forms the main body of the dish and is softened by soaking to draw out excess salt.
Butter
Adds richness and body to the sauce as it melts into the cooking liquid.
Flour
Coats the butter so it thickens the sauce when it melts into the hot liquid.
White wine
Adds acidity and flavour to the cooking liquid, balancing the richness of the butter.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the sauce and helps balance the salmon's saltiness.

The step that matters

Boiling the sauce until thick. Flour thickens only when the sauce is hot enough and given time to boil. Stopping early leaves it thin, while overboiling can make a flour-thickened sauce gluey or cause it to scorch on the base.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (salmon, pepper, onion, nutmeg, parsley, lemon, vinegar):

  1. Dillfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, pepper, onion, nutmeg, parsley, lemon, vinegar. 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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