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Salmon a LA Creme

A creamy salmon dish cooked with butter, flour, milk, fish stock, and seasoned with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Salmon a LA Creme

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and stir until smooth.

  3. Pour in the fish stock and boil for 3 minutes.

  4. Stir in the milk and seasoning.

Add the salmon and serve

  1. Add the salmon in large pieces (if using tinned salmon, strain it from the oil).

  2. Heat through without boiling.

  3. Carefully lift out the salmon.

  4. Add lemon juice to the sauce and strain it over the salmon.

  5. Garnish with parsley or fennel.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Salmon + fishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,078 recipes

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

  4. Butter + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour while forming the base with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Milk or cream
Makes the sauce creamy and mellow, giving body and a soft texture.
Salmon
Provides the main protein, flaking tender in the warm sauce.
Fish stock
Adds savoury depth to the sauce as its main liquid.

The step that matters

Heat through without boiling. Once the salmon is in, boiling the cream sauce can cause it to separate and curdle, and it can toughen the delicate fish. Gentle heat keeps the sauce smooth and the salmon tender.

“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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