Name: Fish
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon brown sugar (for a 5-6 pound salmon); coarse sea salt (optional, to taste); saltpetre (optional, to taste)

Why it works: Sugar and salmon work together. They rank in the top 35% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 931 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Fish

Ingredients

1 tablespoon brown sugar (for a 5-6 pound salmon)
coarse sea salt (optional, to taste)
saltpetre (optional, to taste)

Directions

Prepare

Open the fish and apply the brown sugar down the backbone.
Rub a little sugar on the sides of the fish.
For flat fish like soles and haddocks, lightly sprinkle with sugar.
If desired, add salt or saltpetre to taste.

Cure

Hang the fish in a cold place to preserve.

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.

Sugar + salmontop 35% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together931 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Brown sugar: Sweetens the fish and draws moisture out during curing, helping preserve it.
Salmon: The main fish, which is opened and cured whole along the backbone.

“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.