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Sauce

Fish Sauce a-LA-Craster

A savory sauce made with anchovies, spices, sherry, and gravy, simmered and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Fish Sauce a-LA-Craster

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and whisk in the flour until browned.

  2. Add the chopped anchovies, mace, cloves, black pepper, allspice, onions, herbs, parsley, and horseradish.

  3. Pour in the sherry and strong gravy, then simmer gently for 20 minutes.

  4. Strain the mixture through a sieve and bottle for later use.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Allspice + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,077 recipes

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

  3. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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 give the sauce its deep, salty, savoury backbone.
Flour
Cooked with butter into a roux, it thickens the sauce and gives it body.
Butter
Carries the flour cooking and adds richness to the sauce's base.
Strong gravy
Forms the main liquid, adding savoury depth and body as it simmers.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aromatic complexity to the liquid.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in the butter. The roux must be cooked until browned without burning, since it sets the colour and nutty flavour of the sauce; scorched flour turns bitter and cannot be fixed.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, clove, pepper, allspice, onion, thyme):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, clove, pepper, allspice, onion, thyme. 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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