Name: Salmon on Toast
Ingredients: 1 cup white sauce or drawn butter; ½ cup cream; cold boiled salmon, flaked; 1 teaspoon chopped parsley; a few grains of mace; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste; buttered toast

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Salmon on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Heat the white sauce or drawn butter in a saucepan.
Stir in the cream, flaked salmon, chopped parsley and mace, and season with pepper and salt.
Pour the mixture over slices of buttered toast and serve immediately.

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.

Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,787 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Cream + salmontop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,401 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Parsley + macetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,268 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12,257 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Cold boiled salmon: Forms the main body of the dish, providing flaky texture and savoury flavour.
White sauce or drawn butter: Adds fat and smoothness, carrying flavour and keeping the salmon moist.
Cream: Adds richness and a silky texture to the salmon mixture.
Buttered toast: Gives a crisp, absorbent base that holds the creamy salmon mixture.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, cream, salmon, parsley, pepper):

Capersfits better
Tarragonfits better
Dillfits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, cream, salmon, parsley, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.