Skip to main content
Sauce

A Plain Fish Sauce

A sauce made by boiling anchovies, onions, herbs, horseradish, and vinegar, then mixing with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Thyme and winter savory match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 780 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

A Plain Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the anchovies, onions, and herbs.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil them in 1 pint of water with horseradish and vinegar until the anchovies dissolve.

  2. Strain the mixture.

Finish and serve

  1. Mix the strained sauce with melted butter to your desired proportion, or serve it in a cruet.

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. Thyme + winter savorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together780 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Winter savory + horseradishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together24 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Thyme + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together169 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Dissolve into the liquid to deliver a deep, savory umami base.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its savoriness.
Horseradish
Contributes a sharp, pungent aroma and bite to the sauce.
Melted butter
Adds fat and a rounder, richer mouthfeel when mixed into the strained sauce.

The step that matters

Boil until the anchovies dissolve. Boiling long enough breaks the anchovies down fully, releasing their savory compounds into the water. If they are not fully dissolved, the strained sauce will taste weaker and may contain bits of fish.

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, thyme, winter savory, vinegar, butter):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, thyme, winter savory, vinegar, butter. 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.

More fish sauce recipes

Anchovy 24White 9Dutch 8Broiled 5Brown 5Walnut 5 See all 106 →

You might also like

Horseradish Cream SauceHorseradish Cream Sauce6 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes