Name: Salt Salmon, Pioneer Style
Ingredients: 2 lbs salt salmon or tips; 6 to 8 potatoes, well washed but not peeled

Why it works: Salmon and potato work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 952 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Salt Salmon, Pioneer Style

Ingredients

2 lbs salt salmon or tips
6 to 8 potatoes, well washed but not peeled

Directions

Prepare

Soak the salmon in water overnight to freshen it.

Cook

Place the salmon and raw potatoes in a stewpan.
Cover with boiling water and boil until the potatoes are done.

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.

Salmon + potatotop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together952 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

Salt salmon: Provides the main protein and savory flavor, with salt preserving the fish.
Potatoes: Provide starchy bulk, and their texture becomes tender as they boil.

“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.