Skip to main content
Main

Salmon and Green Peas

A stewed salmon dish flavored with herbs, green peas, cucumber, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Shallot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Salmon and Green Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Place salmon steaks in an enamelled saucepan.

  2. Add bay leaf, mint, shallot, parsley, green peas, and cucumber.

  3. Sprinkle with cayenne pepper and salt.

  4. Pour in white wine and lemon juice.

  5. Gently stew for 45 minutes.

  6. Remove shallot and herbs.

Serve

  1. Place fish in the center of a dish.

  2. Garnish with peas and cucumber.

  3. Pour sauce over the fish.

  4. 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. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Mint + peastop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Shallot + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together264 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Mint + cucumbertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together884 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 firms and flakes as it gently stews.
Green peas
Add sweetness and a soft, tender texture to the stew and garnish.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma, helping to flavour the sauce as it stews.
Lemon juice
Brightens the sauce with acidity that balances the rich fish.

The step that matters

Gently stew for 45 minutes. Keeping the liquid at a gentle simmer cooks the salmon through while keeping it moist and tender. A hard boil tightens the proteins, making the fish dry and flaky in a tough way.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (salmon, shallot, parsley, peas, cucumber, pepper, white wine):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, shallot, parsley, peas, cucumber, pepper, white wine. 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.

You might also like