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Sauce

Making Sauce with Melted Butter for Fish, Flesh, or Fowl

A sauce made by infusing melted butter with anchovies, lemon peel, horseradish, shallots, spices, port wine, mushroom ketchup, and walnut pickle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Making Sauce with Melted Butter for Fish, Flesh, or Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine all ingredients in a wide-mouthed bottle.

  2. Seal the bottle tightly and shake it every day for two weeks.

Strain and bottle

  1. After two weeks, strain the mixture and bottle it again, sealing it tightly.

  2. For added flavor, you can add another ½ pint of walnut pickle to the ingredients.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Shallot + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Horseradish + allspicetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together654 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Dissolve into the liquid to add deep, savory umami flavor.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and body while the mixture steeps.
Mushroom ketchup
Contributes concentrated savory, umami depth to the sauce.
Walnut pickle
Adds tangy, dark, fermented-style flavor that sharpens the sauce.
Horseradish
Provides pungent heat that mellows during the long steeping.

The step that matters

Shaking the bottle daily for two weeks. Regular shaking keeps the solids distributed so flavors extract evenly from the anchovies, shallots and spices. Skipping it can leave the sauce unevenly flavored.

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, shallot, allspice, pepper, celery, port wine, mushroom):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, shallot, allspice, pepper, celery, port wine, mushroom. 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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