Name: Fish Sauce, to Keep a Year
Ingredients: 24 anchovies, chopped; 10 shallots, chopped; 1 handful of scraped horseradish; 4 blades of mace; 1 quart of white wine; 1 pint of anchovy liquor; 1 pint of claret; 12 cloves; 12 peppercorns

Why it works: Shallot and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fish Sauce, to Keep a Year

Ingredients

Directions

Chop the anchovies, shallots, and horseradish.
Combine all ingredients in a pot and boil until reduced to 1 quart.
Strain the mixture and bottle it for use.

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.

Shallot + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together376 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Shallot + clovetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,677 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,400 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).
Horseradish + clovetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,245 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Shallot + white winetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together881 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies: Provide a deep, salty, savoury backbone that defines the sauce's flavour.
Shallots: Add sweetness and aromatic depth as they soften and break down during boiling.
White wine: Acts as the main liquid, extracting flavour from the other ingredients as it reduces.
Claret: Adds acidity and wine character that balances the salty anchovy flavour.

The step that matters

Boil until reduced to 1 quart. Boiling concentrates the liquid and extracts flavour from the solids. Stopping too early leaves the sauce thin and weak, while over-reducing makes it overly salty and intense. Measuring to the stated volume keeps the result consistent.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, horseradish, white wine, anchovy, clove):

Capersfits better
Tarragonfits better
Thymefits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, horseradish, white wine, anchovy, clove. 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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Fish Sauce, to Keep a Year