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Timballe or Salmon À LA Bagration

A chilled salmon timbale made with aspic, mayonnaise, sauce verte, and garnished with crayfish tails and truffle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and crayfish work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 195 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Timballe or Salmon À LA Bagration

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salmon

  1. Cut the cooked salmon into neat square slices and sprinkle with salad oil and lemon juice.

  2. Let the salmon sit for an hour.

Make the sauce

  1. Prepare a mayonnaise flavored with mustard.

  2. Mix ½ cup of this with ½ cup of sauce verte and 1 cup of liquid aspic jelly.

Assemble and serve

  1. Line a round mold with a thin layer of aspic jelly and decorate with crayfish tails and sliced truffle.

  2. Layer the salmon slices in the mold, covering each layer with a thin layer of the mixed sauce until the mold is full.

  3. Finish with a layer of the sauce.

  4. Let the timbale set.

  5. Turn it out of the mold.

  6. Serve garnished with small heaps of crayfish tails.

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. Sauce + crayfishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together195 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Lemon + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Mustard + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,120 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Crayfish + truffletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together129 recipes

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

  5. Salmon + crayfishtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together89 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked salmon
Forms the main body of the timbale and provides its flavor and texture.
Mayonnaise
Adds richness and fat, giving the layers a creamy, smooth texture.
Aspic jelly
Sets with the layers to hold the timbale together and give it a clear, firm finish.
Sauce verte
Adds herbal flavor and color to the sauce layers.
Mustard
Adds sharpness that cuts through the richness of the mayonnaise.

The step that matters

Let the timbale set. Aspic is a gelatin-based jelly that firms only as it chills. If the timbale is turned out before it has set fully, the layers can slump or tear, so it needs enough time to firm before unmolding.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (salmon, mustard, sauce, crayfish, truffle):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, mustard, sauce, crayfish, truffle. 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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