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Sauce

Excellent Fish Sauce

A savory sauce made by simmering eels, anchovies, and spices, then thickened with flour and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Excellent Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eels

  1. Skin the eels, gut, and clean them well.

  2. Cut the eels into pieces and place them in a stew-pan.

Make the sauce

  1. Add water, browned bread, mace, sweet herbs, anchovies, whole pepper, and salt.

  2. Let it simmer until rich.

  3. Thicken the sauce with flour and butter.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eels
Provide the main flesh and body that gives the sauce its rich, savory character.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it coats the back of a spoon.
Butter
Adds fat and smoothness to the thickened sauce.
Anchovies
Contribute salty, savory depth that builds the sauce's flavor.

The step that matters

Let it simmer until rich. Simmering gently extracts flavor and gelatin from the eels and bones slowly; a hard boil can cloud the liquid and make it greasy or bitter. Stop when the liquid tastes concentrated before thickening.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, pepper, flour, butter):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pepper, flour, butter. 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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