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Blanquette of Salmon

A creamy salmon dish served over mashed potatoes, garnished with hard‑boiled egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Blanquette of Salmon

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the milk and cream in a saucepan.

  2. In another pan, melt the butter and stir in the flour until bubbling.

  3. Gradually add the hot cream to the butter and flour mixture.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the salmon, lemon juice, pepper, salt, and cayenne to the cream mixture.

  2. Serve with a border of mashed potatoes and garnish with grated yolk from the hard-boiled egg.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Pepper + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Milk + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Butter
Forms the roux with flour and adds richness to the sauce.
Cream
Adds body, richness and a silky texture to the sauce.
Milk
Thins the roux-based sauce to a pourable consistency with mild sweetness.
Salmon
Provides the main protein and flavour, flaking into the sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually add the hot cream to the butter and flour mixture. Adding liquid slowly while stirring keeps the roux smooth; dumping it in at once can trap flour in lumps that do not dissolve evenly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, cream, butter, flour, salmon, pepper, potato):

  1. Coconutfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Mangofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cream, butter, flour, salmon, pepper, potato. 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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