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Sauce

Fish Sauce to Keep a Year

A preserved anchovy-based sauce made with wine, herbs, and spices, kept for a year.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fish Sauce to Keep a Year

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine all ingredients in a pot.

  2. Boil until the mixture reduces to 1 quart.

  3. Strain the sauce and transfer it to a bottle.

Store and use

  1. Cork the bottle tightly and store in a cold, dry place.

  2. To use, heat 1 teaspoon of the sauce and mix it with ½ pound of butter and a little 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. Shallot + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. White wine + red winetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together97 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Shallot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Break down during boiling to deliver a deep, salty, savoury backbone to the sauce.
Shallots
Add aromatic sweetness and depth as they soften and release flavour into the liquid.
White wine
Provides acidity and liquid that extracts flavour from the solids during reduction.
Red wine
Adds acidity, colour and tannin-driven body to the reduced sauce.
Lemon
Contributes acidity and bright citrus aroma to balance the salty anchovies.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture reduces to 1 quart. Reducing concentrates the salt, acid and flavour of the liquid. Stopping too early leaves the sauce weak and thin, while over-reducing makes it overly salty and harsh.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, horseradish, white wine, lemon, anchovy, red wine, clove):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, horseradish, white wine, lemon, anchovy, red wine, clove. 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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