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Fresh Salmon Stewed

A stewed salmon dish flavored with lemon, shallots, parsley, and peppercorns.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley 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 ↓

Fresh Salmon Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salmon

  1. Sprinkle a little coarse sea salt over the salmon slices and let them rest for 30 minutes.

  2. Turn the salmon slices and let them rest for another 30 minutes.

  3. Wash, drain, and dry the salmon with a clean towel.

Stew the fish

  1. Butter a large fish kettle and lay the salmon pieces in it.

  2. Cover the salmon with thin slices of lemon, shallots, parsley, and whole peppercorns.

  3. Set the kettle over live coals and cover it with hot ashes, ensuring consistent heat for 1 hour.

  4. Remove the lemon and other toppings before serving the fish.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, mix ½ cup of fresh butter with 2 tablespoons of flour in a quart tin vessel.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons of water and the seasoning from the fish kettle, cover, and place in boiling water.

  3. Shake until it boils.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh salmon
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes flaky and tender as it cooks.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and fat, and enriches the sauce as it melts and thickens with flour.
Flour
Thickens the butter into a smooth sauce as it cooks.

The step that matters

Setting the kettle over coals and ashes. Steady, gentle heat keeps the salmon moist and tender. Heat that is too strong can dry out or toughen the flesh, while uneven heat cooks it unevenly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (salmon, butter, shallot, parsley, flour):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, butter, shallot, parsley, flour. 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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