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Fish-sauce

A fermented fish sauce made with walnuts, anchovies, 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

Make the walnut liquid

  1. Slice walnuts into an earthen pan.

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

  3. Stir the mixture daily for two weeks.

  4. Strain the liquid through a coarse cloth.

  5. Let the liquid settle.

  6. Pour off the clear liquid.

Boil and flavour

  1. Boil the liquid with 1 pound of anchovies for each pint.

  2. Skim the mixture.

  3. Let it cool.

  4. Boil again.

  5. Add 1 pint of red port and 1 pint of white vinegar for each pint of liquid.

  6. Include 1/8 ounce each of mace, cloves, and nutmeg.

  7. Add ground mustard, horseradish, and either shallot or a clove of 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

Walnuts
Provide the base liquid through long salting and steeping, giving the sauce its deep, rich character.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the walnuts and preserves the mixture during the two-week steep.
Anchovies
Add savoury, umami depth to the liquid when boiled into it.
Red port
Adds sweetness and body to the finished sauce.
White vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the sauce.
Horseradish
Contributes a pungent, sharp heat to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Skimming after the first boil. Boiling the anchovy mixture draws foam and impurities to the surface. Skimming them off keeps the sauce clear and prevents off flavours from carrying into the final bottled product.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, 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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Anchovy 24White 9Dutch 8Broiled 5Brown 5Walnut 5 See all 106 →

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