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Broiled Smoked Salmon

Broiled smoked salmon with butter, lemon, cayenne, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Broiled Smoked Salmon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and soak the salmon for 1 hour.

  2. Wipe the salmon and cut it into strips 3 inches long and 1 inch wide.

Cook

  1. Parboil in hot water with vinegar and cloves for 15 minutes.

  2. Drain, wipe dry, and broil on a grill until nicely browned.

Serve

  1. Place on a hot dish, butter well, squeeze lemon over the strips, sprinkle with cayenne, and serve.

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. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Vinegar + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Smoked salmon
Provides the main flesh and smoky flavor of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the cooked salmon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, smoky fish.
Vinegar
Acidity in the parboiling water that helps firm the fish.

The step that matters

Broiling until nicely browned. Salmon is already cooked through by smoking and parboiling, so the broiling step is mainly for browning. Leaving it too long dries the strips and toughens the flesh, so watch them closely under the heat.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Dillfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, butter, lemon, pepper, vinegar. 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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