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Timbales of Salmon

A baked dish of salmon and velouté sauce encased in a crisp batter shell.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and fennel work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 455 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Timbales of Salmon

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cases

  1. Mix eggs, flour, and milk into a batter to make timbale cases.

  2. Fry the batter until very crisp.

  3. Dry the fried batter in a cool oven for a few minutes.

Make the filling

  1. Break the cooked salmon into pieces and mix with velouté sauce.

  2. Stir the salmon and sauce mixture over the fire for a few minutes.

Fill and serve

  1. Fill the timbale cases with the salmon mixture.

  2. Serve hot, garnished with 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. Flour + fenneltop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together455 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Salmon + fenneltop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together253 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Egg + salmontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,485 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and help the timbale cases set firm when fried.
Flour
Forms the batter structure that becomes the crisp case.
Milk
Moistens the batter so it spreads and fries to a tender-crisp shell.
Cooked salmon
Provides the main flavour and the flaked texture of the filling.
Velouté sauce
Adds moisture and creaminess that binds the salmon into a filling.

The step that matters

Frying the batter until very crisp. The batter must be fried until fully set and dry; under-frying leaves a soft case that cannot hold the moist salmon filling and collapses when filled.

Swap the fennel

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, flour, milk, salmon, sauce):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Jalapenofits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Fennelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, milk, salmon, sauce. 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.

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