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Melted Butter for Fish

A butter sauce flavored with anchovy essence, soy sauce, mushroom ketchup, cayenne pepper, chili vinegar, or lemon juice, served warm over fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Melted Butter for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan until it is thick enough to adhere to the fish.

  2. Dilute the melted butter with your choice of Essence of Anchovy, Soy sauce, Mushroom ketchup, Cayenne pepper, Chili vinegar, or Lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce warm over the fish.

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Anchovy + saucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Anchovy + ketchuptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together479 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  5. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Forms the base of the sauce, giving richness and a coating texture that clings to fish.
Essence of anchovy
Adds a salty, savoury depth to the butter base.
Soy sauce
Adds salty, savoury flavour to the sauce.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savoury, umami depth to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter.

The step that matters

Melt the butter until it is thick enough to adhere to the fish. Butter that is too thin will run off the fish rather than coat it. Heating gently and watching for the butter to thicken, rather than letting it brown or boil, keeps the sauce smooth and clinging.

“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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