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Sauce

Peerless Fish Sauce

A creamy fish sauce made with boiled fish liquor, eggs, parsley, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

Peerless Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine cream sauce and liquor from boiled fish in a saucepan.

  2. Add minced hard boiled eggs and chopped parsley.

  3. Cook over low heat for 5 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in sliced lemon, salt, and pepper.

  2. Serve immediately.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Fish + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,889 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cream sauce
Forms the creamy base that the other ingredients are suspended in.
Liquor from boiled fish
Adds savory fish flavor and thins the sauce to a pourable consistency.
Hard boiled eggs
Add body and richness, thickening the sauce slightly as they warm.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and fish flavors.

The step that matters

Cook over low heat. Cream-based sauces can scorch or separate when overheated. Gentle heat keeps the sauce smooth while it warms through and the eggs soften.

“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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