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Curried Salmon

A salmon dish cooked with butter, curry powder, Worcestershire sauce, sherry wine, lemon juice, mustard, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Curried Salmon

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a chafing dish.

  2. Add the salmon, curry powder, Worcestershire sauce, sherry wine, lemon juice, salt, mustard, and cayenne pepper.

  3. Cook for a few minutes and serve very 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Sauce + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,120 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 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

Salmon
Provides the main protein and flakes into the sauce as it heats.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to carry the curry powder's flavour.
Curry powder
Supplies the dominant spice aroma and flavour of the dish.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and depth that balances the rich butter and spices.
Lemon juice
Brightens the flavour with acidity that cuts through the fat.

The step that matters

Cook for a few minutes and serve very hot. Cooking only briefly warms the salmon and blooms the curry powder without overcooking the fish. Serving very hot matters because the sauce thickens and the flavours dull as it cools.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (salmon, butter, sauce, sherry, wine, lemon, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, butter, sauce, sherry, wine, lemon, pepper. 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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