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Fish Sauce

A preserved anchovy-based condiment made by boiling anchovies with wine, vinegar, spices, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Chop the anchovies and mix with anchovy liquor, shallots, port wine, vinegar, lemon, horseradish, mace, nutmeg, peppercorns, and cloves.

  2. Boil the mixture for 15 to 20 minutes.

  3. Allow to cool, then strain and bottle it, sealing the corks with wax.

  4. This sauce will keep for a year.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Shallot + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  5. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 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
Break down during boiling to give the sauce its salty, savoury depth.
Port wine
Provides the main liquid and sweetness that balances the sharp vinegar.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the sauce.
Shallots
Contribute a mild onion aroma and savoury base to the liquid.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for 15 to 20 minutes. Boiling extracts flavour from the anchovies, spices and horseradish into the liquid while driving off raw alcohol sharpness. Too short a boil leaves the flavours weak and the sauce less stable in storage.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against anchovy, shallot, port wine, vinegar, lemon, horseradish, nutmeg. 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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