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Sauce

Fish Sauce

A creamy sauce made with milk, cream, eggs, salt, pepper, and lemon, served like drawn butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, combine milk, cream, beaten eggs, salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

  2. Heat over medium heat, stirring constantly until the mixture begins to thicken.

  3. Serve as you would drawn butter.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Thicken the sauce as they set with gentle heat, giving it body.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture from its fat.
Milk
Provides the liquid base that the eggs thicken.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness.

The step that matters

Heating while stirring constantly. Egg proteins set as they warm, so too much heat or too little stirring can scramble the eggs and leave lumps. Gentle, constant stirring keeps the sauce smooth as it thickens.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, cream, egg, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Strawberryfits less well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cream, egg, 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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