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Fish Sauce

A fermented anchovy-based sauce made with wine, vinegar, spices, onion, and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine port wine, vinegar, anchovies, mace, cloves, black pepper, onion, and lemon peel in a pot.

  2. Boil over low heat until the mixture reduces to 1 pint.

Strain and store

  1. Strain the sauce and bottle it.

  2. Seal the bottle tightly and store it.

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

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

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Port wine + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together598 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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 deep, salty, savory backbone.
Port wine
Forms the main liquid base and adds sweetness and body as it reduces.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps preserve the sauce.
Onion
Releases savory sweetness and aroma into the liquid during simmering.

The step that matters

Boil over low heat until reduced to 1 pint. Reducing concentrates flavor and evaporates excess water, so the sauce tastes richer and keeps better. Gentle heat avoids scorching the sugars in the port and extracts flavor without burning.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (port wine, vinegar, clove, pepper, onion, lemon):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against port wine, vinegar, clove, pepper, onion, lemon. 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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