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Boiled Salmon, Crayfish Sauce

A boiled salmon dish flavored with onions, peppercorns, bay leaves, salt, vinegar, and garnished with mushrooms and prawns.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,626 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Boiled Salmon, Crayfish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the salmon

  1. Lay the salmon on a strainer in a fish kettle and cover it with boiling water.

  2. Add the salt, onions, peppercorns, and bay leaves.

  3. Once boiling, add the vinegar and boil gently for about 8 minutes per pound, plus an additional 8 minutes for thickness.

Serve

  1. Lift the fish out using the strainer and let it drain.

  2. Carefully place the fish on a hot dish lined with a folded napkin.

  3. Garnish with heated button mushrooms and prawns.

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. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Vinegar + mushroomtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,070 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (smoky, clove).

  4. Salmon + oniontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,529 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Salmon + mushroomtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together558 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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, cooked gently in simmering liquid until firm and flaky.
White vinegar
Adds a light acidity to the poaching liquid, which helps firm the fish's surface.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the poaching liquid and the fish as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boil gently after the vinegar is added. A rolling boil can break up the fish and make the flesh dry and ragged. Keeping the liquid at a gentle simmer cooks the salmon evenly and keeps it moist and intact.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (salmon, vinegar, mushroom):

  1. Cucumberfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, vinegar, mushroom. 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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