Skip to main content
Sauce

Fish Sauce d-LA-Craster

A savory sauce made with anchovies, spices, sherry, and gravy, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 d-LA-Craster

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and mix in enough flour to thicken it.

  2. Brown the mixture over low heat.

  3. Add the anchovies, mace, cloves, black pepper, allspice, small onions, sweet herbs, parsley, and horseradish.

  4. Pour in the sherry and strong gravy.

  5. Simmer gently for 20 minutes.

  6. Strain the sauce through a sieve and bottle it 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
Break down during simmering to give the sauce its deep, salty savoury flavour.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter so the sauce gains body.
Butter
Carries fat-soluble flavours and forms the base for the flour roux.
Strong gravy
Provides the main liquid and meaty savoury backbone of the sauce.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Brown the mixture over low heat. Browning the butter and flour roux slowly builds nutty, toasted flavour and colour without scorching. Too much heat burns the flour, leaving bitter notes that carry through the whole sauce.

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.

More fish sauce recipes

Anchovy 24White 9Dutch 8Broiled 5Brown 5Walnut 5 See all 106 →

You might also like

Horseradish Cream SauceHorseradish Cream Sauce6 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes