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Salmon Fillets

Salmon fillets seasoned with pepper, sea salt, lemon juice, cooked in fish stock or water, served with watercress and mayonnaise or butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 579 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Salmon Fillets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Divide salmon slices into fillets.

  2. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and a little lemon juice.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook in a small amount of fish stock or water for 10 minutes without covering.

  2. Gently lift out the fillets and place them in well-oiled paper cases.

  3. Just before serving, add a small lump of maître d'hôtel butter on each fillet.

  4. For a cold serving, place on watercress and drizzle with mayonnaise sauce instead of butter.

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 + watercresstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Salmon
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking to a flaky texture when poached gently.
Maître d'hôtel butter
Melts over the hot fillets, adding richness and moisture and carrying the herb flavour.
Mayonnaise sauce
Provides fat and richness for the cold serving, moistening the fish in place of melted butter.

The step that matters

Cook in a small amount of fish stock or water for 10 minutes without covering. Gentle poaching in a small amount of liquid keeps the salmon moist and tender. Cooking too hard or too long dries and toughens the proteins, leaving the flesh firm and chalky.

“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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