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Sauce

Walnut Fish Sauce

A creamy sauce made with butter, lemon juice, pickled walnuts or cucumbers, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Walnut Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, work the softened butter until creamy.

  2. Gradually mix in the lemon juice until well combined.

  3. Stir in the chopped pickled walnuts or cucumbers and minced parsley.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Walnut + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together865 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Unsalted butter
Provides the fat and creamy body that carries the sauce's flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and balances its fattiness.
Pickled walnuts or pickled cucumbers
Supply tangy, briny crunch that gives the sauce its distinctive savoury bite.

The step that matters

Gradually mix in the lemon juice. Adding acid slowly to softened butter lets it emulsify smoothly; dumping it in at once can make the butter split or look greasy and curdled.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Walnutthe original
  4. Almondfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lemon, parsley. 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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