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Fish Sauce

A vinegar-based sauce with cayenne pepper, shallots, garlic, walnut ketchup, and soy sauce, aged for weeks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a large bottle, combine the vinegar, cayenne pepper, shallots, garlic, walnut ketchup, and soy sauce.

  2. Shake the bottle well every day.

Bottle and rest

  1. After two weeks, divide the sauce into smaller bottles and seal them tightly.

  2. The sauce will be ready to use in about three weeks.

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. Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Shallot + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Shallot + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together440 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Vinegar + garlictop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Vinegar
Provides the acidic base that carries the flavors and helps preserve the sauce.
Shallots
Add a mild savory, aromatic onion flavor as they steep in the liquid.
Walnut ketchup
Contributes a deep, savory umami flavor to the sauce.
Soy sauce
Adds salty, savory depth that rounds out the sharpness of the vinegar.
Cayenne pepper
Supplies heat, slowly releasing its pungency into the liquid over time.

The step that matters

Shaking the bottle every day. Daily shaking keeps the solids distributed through the liquid so flavor extracts evenly. Without it, the ingredients can settle unevenly and the sauce may taste uneven or weak in places.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, pepper, shallot, garlic, ketchup, sauce):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Sesamefits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, pepper, shallot, garlic, ketchup, sauce. 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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