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Sauce

A Very Fine Fish Sauce

A sauce made from anchovies, wine, walnut ketchup, pickle, lemon, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

A Very Fine Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a tin saucepan, combine the port wine, mountain wine, walnut ketchup, anchovies with their liquor, walnut pickle, rind and juice of 1 large lemon, shallots, Cayenne pepper, horseradish, mace, and mustard.

  2. Boil gently until the rawness is gone.

  3. Pour into small bottles, cork tightly, and seal the tops.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Walnut + horseradishtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together259 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + horseradishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Ketchup + horseradishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together223 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Provide a salty, savoury backbone and deep umami flavour to the sauce.
Walnut ketchup
Adds concentrated savoury, tangy depth that builds the sauce's character.
Port wine
Contributes sweetness and body as the main liquid base of the sauce.
Horseradish
Adds sharp pungency that mellows during cooking and gives the sauce its bite.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Boil gently until the rawness is gone. Boiling too hard can drive off aroma and over-concentrate the sauce, while stopping early leaves raw, sharp alcohol and vegetable notes. Gentle heat lets flavours meld and mellow evenly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (port wine, wine, walnut, ketchup, lemon, pepper, horseradish):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against port wine, wine, walnut, ketchup, lemon, pepper, horseradish. 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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