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Salmon with Bechamel Sauce

A salmon dish served with a creamy bechamel sauce, garnished with parsley and lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Salmon with Bechamel Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Steam the salmon

  1. Open the tin of salmon by cutting around the edge just below the top.

  2. Leave the top on the tin and place it in a saucepan with enough hot water to reach halfway up the tin.

  3. Bring the water to a boil and steam the salmon for 45 minutes.

Serve

  1. Remove the tin, turn the salmon out onto a hot dish, and pour the Bechamel sauce around it.

  2. Sprinkle with finely chopped parsley and garnish with lemon slices and sprigs of parsley.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 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

Salmon
Forms the main body of the dish and is cooked gently by steam in its tin.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the bechamel sauce, giving it a smooth, pourable body.
Butter
Enriches the bechamel sauce and carries flavour while the flour is cooked into it.
Flour
Thickens the bechamel sauce by binding with the butter and absorbing the milk.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (salmon, milk, onion, butter, flour, pepper, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, milk, onion, butter, flour, pepper, lemon. 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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