Pat Ernst Dugan loves to cook, eat, travel and learn about regional foods. She's been doing it for 18 years.

Dugan, of Corning, shares her culinary knowledge with readers in a weekly food column. "Foodly Yours" covers cooking, dining and Finger Lakes foods, from locally grown produce, cooking gadgets and tools to a a new recipe each week, proposed by Dugan to be "quick-fix, limited ingredient and realistic."

Add these to your culinary pairings: salmon, pistachios
Pat Ernst Dugan
September 8, 2005
Romeo and Juliet, Abbott and Costello, Rogers and Hammerstein, Gilbert and Sullivan, Frankie and Annette, Hillary and Bill, Sonny and Cher. In a memory game where the first name in each of these pairs is given, the second name most usually follows.

Emerging from the culinary world are these famous unions: Dean & DeLuca, A&P, Lea & Perrins, A&W, Ben & Jerry.

Obviously, perfect pairings are not always set in stone, evolving to succeed and grow.

Dean & DeLuca, a high-end retailer of gourmet and specialty foods, previously with one New York City location, now sells via catalog, Internet and is one-third owned by Itochu Corp. of Japan. New stores are planned for Japan and China.

Chunky Monkey, Ben & Jerry’s banana ice cream with chocolate chunks and walnuts, is based on the wonderful flavor combination of chocolate and bananas. Along with Cherry Garcia’s unusual merging of cherries and chocolate, both are in the top 10 of the company’s most popular ice cream flavors.

So do we always have to eat ham with eggs, fish with chips, peanut butter with jelly, meat and potatoes, peaches and cream? Perhaps it’s time to start new traditions.

Consider this colorful plate combination: the rich red of Alaskan wild salmon and the lime green of California shelled, roasted and salted pistachios. Not quite the ring of oil and vinegar, but it’s an extra special, twinkly pairing, especially when the pistachios are churned into a compound butter that is almost worth walking over hot coals for. The bonus is a fast and flavorful, hot and healthy entree suitable for a weekday supper or worthy of company fare.

Compound butters have long been a favorite of restaurant chefs. Now the promise for home cooks is the ease of creating these flavored butters at home and storing them in the refrigerator or freezer for the grilling or broiling season.

Combos you may know
Biscuits warm from the oven can be served with a simple combination of stirred soft butter and honey. Finely chopped garlic is merged with butter for the famous spaghetti dinner partner of garlic bread.
In recent years, beef has been delightfully paired with blue cheese, a superstar combination whether served in a sauce over pan-sauteed beef tenderloin steaks or topped with Gorgonzola butter immediately after removing from the saute pan or grill. The butter melts, leaving the beef topped with promising new-style flavors.

Gorgonzola butter
To prepare, roast 2 heads of garlic, drizzled with olive oil in a foil packet in a 350-degree oven for an hour. While garlic is roasting, place a 1/2 cup butter (1 stick) in a small bowl with 2 ounces of Gorgonzola cheese crumbled.

Remove garlic from oven, cool. Squeeze garlic cloves into the softened butter and blue cheese. Add 2 tablespoons chopped parsley or chives and stir to combine. Refrigerate.

When grilled burgers or special-occasion beefsteaks are served, simply top with 1 tablespoon of this goof-proof nippy butter.

Chefs place compound butter mixtures on sheets of plastic wrap and form it into a log by rolling until the log measures about 1 inch in diameter. These are then frozen, to be sliced and thawed as needed.

Roast Salmon and Pistachio Butter
Pistachio Butter ingredients:
2/3 cup shelled, salted pistachios
1/2 cup butter, softened
2 tablespoons snipped fresh chives
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
3 teaspoons peeled, grated ginger root

Preparation: Process pistachios until coarsely chopped. Place in bowl with butter, chives, lemon juice and ginger root. Combine well. Refrigerate or roll into a log and freeze.

Roast Salmon ingredients:
8 5-ounce pieces King salmon fillets
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper

Preparation: Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Heat olive oil in a heavy skillet over medium high heat. Brown salmon fillets, on nonskin side, four at a time, for about 2 minutes.

Place salmon, skin side down, in a shallow baking pan. Roast 4-5 minutes. Remove from oven, sprinkle with salt and pepper, top with 1 tablespoon pistachio butter and place on serving dish or individual plates..