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Cream Sauce for Salmon, or North Wales Sauce

A buttery anchovy cream sauce for salmon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Cream Sauce for Salmon, or North Wales Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Dissolve the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add flour until it absorbs the butter.

  3. When it boils, add the milk and let it boil gently.

  4. Stir in the cream and season with pepper and salt.

  5. Add anchovies or anchovy sauce and let it simmer for a few minutes without boiling.

Serve

  1. Keep it hot in a bain‑marie and serve hot.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour, giving it a rich mouthfeel.
Flour
Absorbs the melted butter and thickens the sauce into a smooth body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a sauce.
Rich cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the sauce.
Anchovies
Adds a salty, savoury depth of flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Add anchovies or anchovy sauce and let it simmer for a few minutes without boiling.. Once the sauce is thickened and enriched, boiling can cause the cream to separate and the sauce to turn grainy or thin. Gentle simmering keeps it smooth while the anchovy flavour blends in.

“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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