Name: Fish Sauce to Keep a Fear
Ingredients: 1 pint walnut juice; 1 pound anchovies; ¼ ounce mace; ¼ ounce cloves; whole white pepper to taste; 7-8 shallots; a few cloves of garlic; 1 pint white wine vinegar

Why it works: Shallot and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fish Sauce to Keep a Fear

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

Cut and pound walnuts to obtain 1 pint of juice.

Make the sauce

In a pot, combine walnut juice and anchovies; boil until dissolved.
Strain the mixture through muslin.
Return the strained mixture to the pot; add mace, cloves, white pepper, shallots, garlic, and vinegar.
Boil until shallots are tender, then strain again.

Cool and bottle

Let the sauce cool, then bottle in containers no larger than ¼ pint.

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.

Shallot + garlictop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,000 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Clove + shallottop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,677 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Walnut + shallottop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together440 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,400 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).
Walnut + clovetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,592 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 salty, savoury depth.
White wine vinegar: Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps keep the sauce stable.
Walnut juice: Forms the liquid base in which the anchovies dissolve and the other flavourings are carried.
Shallots: Soften during boiling, adding mild sweetness and aromatic body to the sauce.
Garlic: Contributes pungent aroma that mellows during the long boil.

The step that matters

Boil until shallots are tender, then strain again. Boiling must be long enough to soften the shallots and fully extract their flavour into the liquid, but not so long that the sauce reduces too far or loses its fresh aroma. Straining again removes the cooked solids so the sauce stays clear and smooth.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (walnut, mace, clove, shallot, garlic, white wine, vinegar):

Tarragonfits better
Thymefits better
Allspicefits better
White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, mace, clove, shallot, garlic, white wine, vinegar. 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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Fish Sauce to Keep a Fear