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To Preserve Salt Fish

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and salmon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,078 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

To Preserve Salt Fish

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Soak smaller fish in lukewarm water for 1 hour or less, depending on thickness.

  2. Drain the fish for 30 minutes before dressing.

  3. Wash dried herring and anchovies in hot water.

  4. Soak herring in hot water for 3-4 minutes, then drain.

  5. Remove anchovies immediately after washing and scraping.

  6. For red herrings, steep in boiling beer until the liquid cools.

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. Fish + salmontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,078 recipes

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

  2. Fish + beertop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Salmon + beertop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together57 recipes

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

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

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