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Boiled Salted Salmon

A boiled salted salmon served with butter and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Salmon and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,481 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Boiled Salted Salmon

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the salted salmon overnight.

Cook and serve

  1. In the morning, place the salmon in a skillet and cover with fresh water.

  2. Boil for about 15 minutes.

  3. Drain the salmon and place it on a hot platter.

  4. Top the fish with bits of butter and dust with pepper.

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. Salmon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,481 recipes

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

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  3. Salmon + peppertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,446 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

Salted salmon
Is the main ingredient, whose salt is drawn out by overnight soaking before cooking.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, savory finish to the cooked fish.

The step that matters

Soaking the salted salmon overnight. Soaking draws out excess salt from the cured fish. Skipping or shortening it leaves the salmon too salty, since salt diffuses out of the flesh slowly into the water.

“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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