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Dressed Salmon

A salmon dish prepared with a brown sauce made from vegetables, herbs, anchovies, vinegar, stock, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Dressed 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.

Poach the salmon

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a fish kettle or large baking dish, place the salmon and cover with butter paper.

  3. Prepare the sauce by combining carrot, turnip, celery, onion, sweet herbs, mace, whole pepper, cloves, bay leaf, anchovies, vinegar, brown stock, and sherry.

  4. Pour the sauce over the salmon and let it stew until cooked through.

Make the sauce

  1. Drain the stock from the fish and thicken it by straining through a fine sieve.

  2. If using capers, add them to the sauce and boil, skimming off any grease.

  3. Season the sauce with lemon juice, cayenne pepper, salt, and sugar, and add essence of anchovies if desired.

Fry and serve

  1. Cut the salmon into cutlet shapes.

  2. Heat clarified butter in a saucepan and add cayenne pepper.

  3. Fry each cutlet in the butter until golden, then place them on paper to absorb excess grease.

  4. Serve with the prepared brown 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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 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
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes flaky and tender when gently stewed.
Brown stock
Provides the liquid base of the sauce, carrying savory depth once thickened and reduced.
Anchovies
Contribute a savory, salty depth that melts into the sauce and enriches its flavor.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of stock and butter.
Sherry
Adds aromatic sweetness and acidity to the sauce, deepening its overall flavor.
Clarified butter
Fries the cutlets to a golden crust while adding richness and browning.

The step that matters

Fry each cutlet in the butter until golden. Clarified butter has no milk solids to burn, so it can reach a high frying heat and brown the surface evenly. Too little heat leaves the cutlets pale and greasy, while too much can scorch the cayenne and darken the coating unevenly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (salmon, carrot, turnip, celery, onion, pepper, clove):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, carrot, turnip, celery, onion, pepper, clove. 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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