Name: Fresh Salmon Broiled
Ingredients: Fresh salmon; Sweet oil or thick melted butter; Coarse sea salt

Why it works: Salmon and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,481 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Fresh Salmon Broiled

Ingredients

Fresh salmon
Sweet oil or thick melted butter
Coarse sea salt

Directions

Prepare the salmon

Clean the salmon well and cut it into slices about 1.5 inches thick.
Dry the slices thoroughly with a clean cloth.
Rub the salmon with sweet oil or melted butter and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

Broil

Preheat a gridiron over a clear fire at a distance.
Wipe the gridiron clean and rub it with sweet oil or lard.
Place the salmon on the gridiron and broil until done on one side, then gently turn and broil the other side.

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.

Salmon + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,481 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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, cooking to a flaky texture when broiled.
Sweet oil or melted butter: Adds fat that carries flavour and helps the surface brown and stay moist.