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Sauce

Fish Sauce

A sauce made with butter, flour, boiling water, egg yolks, mustard, tarragon vinegar, and salad oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 901 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter and flour in a pan until it bubbles.

  2. Gradually add the boiling water and remove from heat.

  3. Slowly stir in the beaten egg yolks, a little at a time.

  4. Add the mustard, tarragon vinegar, and salad oil, stirring until smooth.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

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. Mustard + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + tarragontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together788 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and add richness as they set gently into the warm base.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour and, with flour, forms the base that thickens the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and water base so the sauce becomes smooth and body-rich.
Salad oil
Adds fat and silky mouthfeel that keeps the finished sauce smooth.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks slowly. Adding beaten yolks gradually to hot liquid lets them warm evenly, so they thicken smoothly instead of scrambling into lumps.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits about as well
  3. Mustardthe original
  4. Asparagusfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, egg, tarragon, vinegar. 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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