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Walnut Catchup for Fish Sauces

A walnut-based sauce for fish made with walnut pickle, anchovies, and Port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and port wine work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 237 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Walnut Catchup for Fish Sauces

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the walnut pickle, anchovies, and Port wine.

  2. Boil the mixture until it reduces by one third.

  3. Strain the sauce and let it cool.

Bottle

  1. Preserve the catchup in small bottles and cork them tightly.

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. Walnut + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together237 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Walnut pickle
Provides the base flavour and liquid, concentrated as the sauce reduces.
Anchovies
Adds salty, savoury depth that rounds out the sauce.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and body, and its alcohol helps carry aromatics during reduction.

The step that matters

Reducing the mixture by one third. Boiling concentrates flavour and thickens the liquid. Stopping too early leaves the sauce thin and weakly flavoured, while over-reducing makes it too salty and intense.

“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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