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Sauce

Dutch Sauce Foe Fish

A vinegar-based sauce with horseradish, egg yolks, butter, flour, and water, served immediately to fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 743 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Dutch Sauce Foe Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil vinegar and horseradish in a porcelain saucepan for 5 minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture and let it cool.

  3. Add egg yolks, butter, flour, water, and salt to the cooled mixture.

  4. Stir over gentle heat with a wooden spoon until the mixture is almost boiling.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately to prevent curdling.

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. Horseradish + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + horseradishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify and thicken the sauce as they cook gently, giving it a rich body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping create a smooth, silky texture when emulsified with the yolks.
Flour
Stabilises the emulsion and gives the sauce extra body so it holds together.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that sharpens the flavour and balances the richness of the butter and yolks.

The step that matters

Stir over gentle heat until almost boiling. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat, but too much heat scrambles them and causes curdling. Stirring constantly with gentle heat keeps the emulsion smooth. Serving immediately also prevents the sauce from separating or curdling as it cools.

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, egg, butter, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Cucumberfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, egg, butter, flour. 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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