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Fish Sauce

A savory sauce made with egg yolks, anchovies, butter, flour, elder vinegar, herbs, pepper, salt, nutmeg, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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. In a saucepan, combine the egg yolks, anchovies, butter, flour, elder vinegar, sweet herbs, pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

  2. Stir over low heat until the mixture thickens, but do not let it boil.

  3. If the sauce is not sharp enough, add a little lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the fish 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they set gently over low heat, giving it a smooth, rich body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and giving the sauce a silky texture.
Flour
Helps stabilise the emulsion and adds body so the sauce holds together.
Anchovies
Contribute salty, savoury depth that rounds out the sauce.
Elder vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and yolk mixture.

The step that matters

Stir over low heat without boiling. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat, but boiling can scramble them and cause the sauce to curdle and lose its smooth texture.

“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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