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White Fish Sauce

A light sauce made from fish bones, milk, and seasonings, finished with cream and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

White Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the milk infusion

  1. Boil the milk with fish bones, bay leaf, mace, and ½ cup of water.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the flour, and stir for a few moments without browning.

  2. Gradually stir in the prepared milk mixture, bring to a boil while stirring, and let simmer for ten minutes.

  3. Remove the bay leaf and mace, strain the sauce, then heat it again.

  4. Add the cream, lemon juice, and season to taste before serving.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  4. Butter + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour, giving it a rich mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter and then combined with liquid.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as the flour cooks.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the milk. Adding the milk mixture gradually while stirring keeps the flour evenly dispersed, preventing lumps. Bringing it to a boil while stirring lets the starch swell and thicken the sauce smoothly.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, milk, cream, mace, lemon, fish):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, cream, mace, lemon, fish. 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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