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Fish Sauce

A sauce made by boiling haddock or flounder with mace, pepper, salt, crust, horseradish, ketchup, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Haddock and ketchup share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 23 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Wash the fish very clean.

  2. Place the fish in a saucepan and cover with water.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the mace, white pepper, coarse sea salt, toasted crust, horseradish, and ketchup.

  2. Boil for half an hour.

  3. Strain the mixture and add butter and flour.

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. Haddock + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Horseradish + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Horseradish + ketchuptop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together223 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Haddocks or flounders
Provide the fish base that gives the sauce its savoury body and flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Flour
Thickens the strained liquid so it becomes a sauce rather than a thin broth.
Horseradish
Adds a sharp, pungent heat that brightens the savoury flavour.

The step that matters

Strain the mixture and add butter and flour. Flour needs to be fully dispersed in the hot liquid to avoid lumps and to thicken evenly. Adding it to a strained, simmering liquid helps it dissolve smoothly as starch swells with heat.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (haddock, mace, horseradish, ketchup, butter, flour):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against haddock, mace, horseradish, ketchup, butter, flour. 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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