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To Make Quins Fish Sauce

A fermented fish sauce made with walnut pickle, anchovies, spices, and red wine, finished with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

To Make Quins Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine walnut pickle, anchovies, mace, cloves, whole pepper, bay leaves, and shallots in a pot.

  2. Boil until anchovies dissolve.

  3. Let cool, then stir in red wine and bottle the mixture.

Serve

  1. To serve, shake the bottle and mix 2 tablespoons of sauce with melted butter.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Clove + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Clove + red winetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together849 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Walnut pickle
Provides the main liquid and its dark, strongly flavoured base for the sauce.
Anchovies
Dissolve into the mixture to add deep savoury, salty flavour.
Shallots
Add mild sweetness and aromatic depth as they cook down into the sauce.
Red wine
Adds acidity and fruity depth to the finished sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded fat when mixed with the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil until anchovies dissolve. Anchovies must break down fully so their savoury flavour blends evenly into the liquid. Stopping early leaves whole fish pieces and an uneven, harsh taste.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (walnut, clove, pepper, shallot, red wine, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, clove, pepper, shallot, red wine, 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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