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Sauce

A Plain Fish Sauce

A sauce made from anchovies, onions, herbs, horseradish, vinegar, water, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,784 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Plain Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Chop the anchovies, onions, and herbs.

  2. Boil the chopped ingredients in ½ pint of water.

  3. Add the scraped horseradish and vinegar.

  4. Boil until the anchovies dissolve.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain the mixture.

  2. Mix with melted butter to serve.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Horseradish + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Vinegar + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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 add salty, savoury depth to the sauce.
Onions
Add sweetness and an aromatic base as they soften in the boiling water.
Horseradish
Contributes sharp, pungent heat and a clean, biting aroma.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the savoury flavours.
Melted butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the strained sauce a smoother, silkier mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Boil the horseradish with the anchovies. Horseradish's sharp heat comes from volatile compounds that fade with prolonged boiling, so the sauce can taste flat if it is boiled too long after the horseradish goes in.

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, 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.

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