Name: Fish Sauce
Ingredients: 2 tablespoons walnut catsup; 1 teaspoon salt; ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper; 1 quart best cider vinegar; 1 bruised garlic clove

Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Mix walnut catsup, salt, cayenne pepper, cider vinegar, and bruised garlic in a bowl.
Transfer the mixture to large bottles.
Let it stand for a week, stirring every day.
Cork the bottles tightly.
Use the sauce with any fish.

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.

Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together17,451 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,431 recipes

Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).
Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,090 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Walnut + clovetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,592 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Garlic + clovetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,368 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, cider, vinegar, garlic, clove):

Chickpeafits better
Beansfits better
Black-eyed peafits better
Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, cider, vinegar, garlic, clove. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.