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Fish Sauce

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

  1. Mix the flour with the cold water until smooth.

  2. Put it into a saucepan with the butter and stir until it boils.

  3. Add the nutmeg, sugar, cayenne, and salt.

  4. Beat the egg yolks and add them to the saucepan, stirring until thickened without boiling.

  5. Pour into a basin and stir until cold.

  6. Add the lemon juice and capers, ensuring the capers have no vinegar.

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. Capers + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Nutmeg + caperstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together211 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, pepper, butter, egg, nutmeg, lemon):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, pepper, butter, egg, nutmeg, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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