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Bichamel Sauce for Salmon

A creamy white sauce made with milk, onion, spices, butter, flour, and salt, served over salmon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Bichamel Sauce for Salmon

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the milk with the onion, cayenne pepper, and mace for ten minutes.

  2. Melt the butter in a pan.

  3. Add the flour and fry together for 1-2 minutes without browning.

  4. Strain the milk and gradually stir it into the flour and butter mixture.

  5. Bring to a boil and add salt to taste.

Finish and serve

  1. If lumpy, strain through a strainer over the fish.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the roux thickens into a smooth sauce.
Butter
Carries flavour and fat, and with the flour forms the roux that thickens the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by swelling in the hot liquid once combined with the butter.

The step that matters

Adding the milk to the roux. Stirring the milk in gradually keeps the flour and butter smooth; adding it all at once tends to form lumps that are hard to remove.

Swap the mace

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

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

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