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Creamed Salmon

A salmon dish served over buttered toast with a milk and flour cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Creamed Salmon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Heat the can of salmon in boiling water before opening.

Make the cream sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine milk and flour to make a cream sauce.

  2. Add butter, salt, and pepper to the sauce, stirring until thickened.

Serve

  1. Pour the cream sauce over the salmon placed on buttered toast.

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

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Salmon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Salmon + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,577 recipes

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

Flour and butter 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

Salmon
Provides the main protein and the flaked body of the dish.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a cream sauce as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, giving it a smooth, creamy texture.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the sauce and toast.

The step that matters

Stirring the sauce until thickened. Flour must be whisked into the milk and kept moving while it heats, otherwise it can clump. Heating lets the starch granules swell and thicken the liquid into a smooth sauce.

“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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