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Sauce

Imperial Fish Sauce

A walnut-based fish sauce made with anchovies, shallots, garlic, vinegar, spices, and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Imperial Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnut juice

  1. Pound the juice out of green walnuts and let it stand overnight to clear.

Make the sauce

  1. In a well-tinned saucepan, combine the walnut juice, anchovies, shallots, garlic, vinegar, cloves, mace, Jamaica peppercorns, and horseradish.

  2. Bring to a boil, skimming well, and boil for a reasonable time.

Cool, strain and bottle

  1. Pour into an earthen pan, let it cool, then strain and bottle for use.

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. Shallot + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Shallot + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Shallot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Garlic + horseradishtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together719 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Walnut + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Walnut juice
Forms the liquid base and gives the sauce its characteristic dark, savoury flavour.
Anchovies
Dissolve during boiling to add deep, salty umami that carries the whole sauce.
Shallots
Add sweetness and aromatic body as they soften in the simmering liquid.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps keep the sauce stable.
Cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice notes to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Skimming while boiling. Bringing the mixture to a boil releases foam and impurities from the anchovies and shallots that rise to the surface. Skimming them off keeps the sauce clear and clean-tasting before it is strained and bottled.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (walnut, shallot, clove, garlic, vinegar, horseradish):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, shallot, clove, garlic, vinegar, horseradish. 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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