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To Pry Salmon and Other Fish in Oil

A simple fried salmon dish cooked in olive oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Olive and salmon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,942 recipes. Both carry trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Pry Salmon and Other Fish in Oil

Ingredients

Directions

Fry the salmon

  1. Heat the olive oil in a small deep frying pan over a clear fire until it stops bubbling.

  2. Carefully add the salmon and fry gently until cooked through, ensuring the surface is lightly browned.

  3. Lift the pan from the fire to prevent further browning once the proper color is achieved.

Finish and serve

  1. Drain the fish well and let it cool completely before serving.

  2. Garnish with light foliage.

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. Olive + salmontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,942 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Salmon
The main protein; it firms and turns opaque as it cooks through.
Olive oil
Fat that carries heat evenly for frying and helps the surface brown and flavour the fish.

The step that matters

Carefully add the salmon and fry gently. The fish must be well dried, because surface moisture cools the hot oil and causes spattering and steaming instead of browning. Gentle heat then cooks the salmon through without scorching the outside.

“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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