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Sauce

Walnut Ketchup for Fish Sauce

A walnut-based sauce made with anchovies and red wine, reduced and bottled for use with fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and red wine work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 125 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Walnut Ketchup for Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a pot, combine the walnut pickle, anchovies, and red wine.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil and reduce it until it is one third of the original volume.

  3. Strain the sauce and let it cool.

Bottle

  1. Pour the cooled sauce into small bottles and seal them tightly with corks.

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. Walnut + red winetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together125 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

What each ingredient does

Walnut pickle
Provides the main savory, tangy base flavor of the sauce.
Anchovies
Adds deep savory umami that builds as the sauce reduces and concentrates.
Red wine
Adds acidity and body, and its liquid is concentrated by reduction.

The step that matters

Reducing the mixture to one third. Boiling evaporates water and concentrates the flavors and salt, so the sauce becomes intensely savory. Reducing too little leaves it thin and weakly flavored, while reducing too far can make it overly salty and sharp.

“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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