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Escalloped Salmon

A salmon dish baked with a thick milk and flour gravy, topped with buttered cracker crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

Escalloped Salmon

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Thicken the milk with the flour until it reaches the consistency of thick gravy.

Combine and bake

  1. Break up the salmon and mix it with butter, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  2. Add the salmon mixture to the gravy.

  3. Top with buttered cracker crumbs and bake.

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. Milk + flourtop 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. Milk + salmontop 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the gravy that holds the salmon together.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a gravy through starch gelatinization as it heats.
Salmon
Provides the main flavor and flaked texture of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the top crumbs brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Thickening the milk with flour. Flour must be stirred in and heated long enough for its starch to swell and thicken the milk. If it is undercooked or lumpy, the gravy stays thin or tastes raw and floury, and the dish will not hold together when baked.

“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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