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Sauce

Fish Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, flour, fish stock, mace, lemon juice, parsley, capers, and egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Fish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. Add the flour and cook slowly until yellow.

  3. Stir in the fish stock, mace, lemon juice, parsley, capers, and egg yolk.

  4. Mix well and heat through 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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Provides fat and rich flavour as the base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with the butter into a roux.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps emulsify and thicken the sauce as it heats.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolk and heat gently. Egg yolk can scramble if the sauce is too hot. Heating it gently over low heat lets it thicken smoothly instead of curdling.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, fish, lemon, parsley, capers, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, fish, lemon, parsley, capers, egg. 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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