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Sauce

A Very Fine Fish Sauce

A sauce made from wine, anchovies, walnut ketchup, and spices, boiled and bottled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and horseradish 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 ↓

A Very Fine Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine the port wine, mountain wine, walnut ketchup, anchovies with their liquor, walnut pickle, lemon rind and juice, shallots, cayenne pepper, horseradish, mace, and mustard in a tin saucepan.

  2. Boil gently until the rawness is gone.

Bottle

  1. Pour the sauce into small bottles, cork them tightly, and seal the tops.

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. Shallot + horseradishtop 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 + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Walnut + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together440 recipes

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

  5. Walnut + horseradishtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together259 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
Add salty, savoury depth that gives the sauce its umami character.
Walnut ketchup
Contributes concentrated savoury, slightly sweet flavour as the main seasoning base.
Port wine
Provides the liquid base and a sweet, rich wine flavour.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that mellows during gentle cooking.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richer ingredients.

The step that matters

Boil gently until the rawness is gone. Gentle boiling drives off raw alcohol and sharp volatile compounds from the wine and horseradish, mellowing the flavour. Boiling too hard can evaporate too much liquid and concentrate the sauce unevenly.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Chestnutfits about as well
  2. Walnutthe original
  3. Beansfits about as well
  4. Peasfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against port wine, wine, ketchup, lemon, shallot, pepper, horseradish. 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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