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Fish-sauce

A fermented fish sauce made by pickling fish, salt, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fish-sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the wahiuts

  1. Slice wahiuts into an earthen pan.

  2. Layer with a small handful of coarse sea salt.

  3. Stir daily for 14 days with a wooden stick.

  4. Strain the liquid through a coarse cloth and let it settle.

Make the sauce

  1. Pour off the clear liquid and boil with 1 pound of anchovies for each pint.

  2. Skim the liquid and let it cool.

  3. Boil again, then add 1 pint of red port and 1 pint of white vinegar for each pint of liquid.

  4. Add 1/8 ounce each of mace, cloves, and nutmeg, along with ground mustard, horseradish, and shallot or garlic to each bottle.

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. Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Mustard + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together859 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Horseradish + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Break down into a salty, savoury base that gives the sauce its depth of flavour.
Red port
Adds sweetness and body, rounding out the sharpness of the sauce.
White vinegar
Adds acidity that helps preserve the sauce and brightens its flavour.
Wahiuts
Ferments with the salt over time, producing the liquid that forms the sauce's base.

The step that matters

Boil again, then add the port and vinegar. Boiling drives off excess moisture and sets the balance of salt, acidity and sweetness. Adding the port and vinegar to a boiling liquid helps blend them evenly before the sauce is bottled.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, clove, nutmeg, mustard, horseradish, shallot):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, clove, nutmeg, mustard, horseradish, shallot. 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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