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South Wales Salmon

A whole salmon is salted, vinegar‑soaked, cooled, reheated, and optionally fried in batter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Salmon and fish sauce work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 119 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

South Wales Salmon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salmon

  1. Make incisions between the head and tail of the salmon, 2 inches wide and 1 inch deep.

  2. Soak the salmon in cold water for 1 hour.

  3. Place the salmon in a fish kettle with enough cold water to cover it.

  4. Add ½ cup of coarse sea salt and ⅓ cup of vinegar to the water.

Poach and cool

  1. Heat the water until it is scalding hot, then remove from heat.

  2. Pour the hot water into a pan and let the salmon cool in a strainer over the pan until the next day.

  3. Reheat the salmon in the same water until warmed through, ensuring it does not boil.

Serve leftovers

  1. If there is leftover salmon, fry it in batter after sprinkling with salt and optionally adding Granville fish sauce.

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 + fish saucetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together119 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Salmon + vinegartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Vinegar + fish saucetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together227 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Coarse sea salt
Seasons the salmon and firms its flesh during the soak and poach.
Vinegar
Adds a mild acidity that brightens the flavour of the fish.

The step that matters

Reheating without boiling. Keeping the water just below a boil warms the salmon gently. Boiling toughens the proteins in the flesh, making it dry and firm, so the fish stays moist and 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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