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Fish Sauce

A sauce made from fish bones, onion, herbs, milk, water, and a roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Cut the head off the fish bones, wash, and break them up.

  2. Put the bones into a saucepan with the onion, bay leaf, parsley, thyme, and season with salt and pepper.

  3. Pour milk and water over the bones and simmer the stock slowly for 10 minutes.

  4. Strain the stock.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pan, melt the butter and cook the flour in it slowly for 3 to 4 minutes to make a roux.

  2. Off the heat, mix in the strained stock, stir to a boil, and cook for 5 minutes.

  3. Strain the sauce again before serving.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish bones
Provide the base flavour of the stock.
Butter
Carries flavour and forms the fat base of the roux.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter to form a roux.
Milk
Adds richness and body to the stock and sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the roux. Cooking the flour in butter for a few minutes removes its raw taste and lets it thicken evenly. Adding the stock off the heat helps prevent lumps forming.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (whiting, butter, flour, parsley, thyme, milk, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against whiting, butter, flour, parsley, thyme, milk, pepper. 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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