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Sauce

An Excellent Fish Sauce

A sauce made from anchovies, eschalots, horseradish, mace, cloves, lemons, anchovy liquor, Rhenish wine, and water, boiled and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

An Excellent Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine anchovies, eschalots, horseradish, mace, cloves, lemons, anchovy liquor, Rhenish wine, and water in a pot.

  2. Boil the mixture until it reduces to 1 quart.

  3. Skim the surface well and strain through a sieve.

Bottle

  1. Once cooled, bottle the sauce and seal the corks.

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. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Horseradish + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Horseradish + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Provide the salty, savoury umami base that gives the sauce its character.
Eschalots
Add aromatic sweetness and depth as they soften and release flavour into the liquid.
Horseradish
Contributes sharp, pungent heat that mellows during the long simmer.
Lemons
Add acidity and citrus brightness that balances the salty anchovy flavour.
Rhenish wine
Adds acidity and body, and helps extract flavour from the other ingredients.

The step that matters

Reducing the mixture to 1 quart. Boiling concentrates the salt, acid and flavour, so the sauce keeps its intensity. Stopping too early leaves it thin and weak. Skimming the surface removes foam and impurities that would cloud the finished sauce.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (horseradish, clove, lemon, anchovy, wine):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against horseradish, clove, lemon, anchovy, wine. 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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