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Dried Salmon

A salmon cured with sugar and salt, dried, and served sliced or flaked with egg sauce or mashed potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Dried Salmon

Ingredients

Directions

Cure

  1. Mix coarse sugar and bay salt into the salmon and let it sit on a large dish for two days.

  2. Rub the salmon with common salt and let it dry for 24 hours.

  3. Hang the salmon in a dry place, keeping it open with two small sticks.

Serve

  1. To serve, cut the dried salmon into slices and broil in buttered paper.

  2. For egg sauce, omit if serving at breakfast.

  3. Alternatively, pull the salmon into flakes and mix with chopped hard-boiled eggs, thin cream, and butter mixed with flour.

  4. Heat the mixture until boiling and pour it into a wall of mashed potatoes on a serving dish.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + potatotop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Salmon (in the method)
Is the main food that is cured, dried and served.
Eggs
Add body and richness to the optional egg sauce when they are set by heat.
Thin cream
Adds moisture and richness to the egg sauce, thinning it as it heats.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and with flour it thickens the egg sauce.

The step that matters

Heating the egg sauce. Once the mixture boils, the flour-thickened butter and cream set into a smooth sauce. Heating too gently leaves it thin, while overheating can curdle the eggs and cream, so it needs steady attention.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, egg, cream, flour):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, cream, flour. 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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