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Canned Salmon

A simple dish of canned salmon simmered in milk thickened to a creamy consistency.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Canned Salmon

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Canned Salmon

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dish

  1. Place the salmon in a small frying pan.

  2. Pour enough milk over the fish to nearly cover it.

  3. Cover the frying pan and let it simmer slowly, keeping the milk just at the bubbling point.

  4. Thicken the milk with 1 tablespoon of corn-starch mixed with a little cold milk, adding it gradually to the boiling milk.

  5. Add enough thickening to make the milk resemble cream.

  6. Season with salt, pepper, and butter.

Serve

  1. Serve on a hot platter, optionally on nicely toasted bread.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Salmon + fishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the creamy sauce that surrounds and moistens the salmon as it simmers.
Corn-starch
Thickens the warm milk so it becomes creamy rather than thin.
Salmon
Provides the main protein and flavor, cooked gently in the simmering milk.

The step that matters

Adding the corn-starch mixture. Cornstarch must be mixed with cold milk first and added gradually to hot milk while stirring, otherwise it clumps. It thickens when the liquid reaches a simmer, so the milk should be kept hot but not boiling hard.

“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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