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Fish Sauces

In using the right fish sauce the first thing to decide is whether your fish is fat or lean:

Lean fish are in the great majority, and they require sauces with well balanced flavor and with plenty of butter or other fat to make up for their lack of it. The liquid in which they were poached, or the pan contents with which they were baked, are the bases for the most successful sauces that can be served with them. But in most cases no sauce would suit them better than plain melted butter.

Fat fish, already rich enough in their own oils, require tart and piquant sauces. These fish are not usually baked or boiled, but when they are, their cooking liquids are often too strongly flavored to make into sauce. Some of the commonest fat fish are practically all members of the mackerel and herring families, smelts, salmon, shad, striped bass, sturgeon, pompano, lake trout, whitefish, and eels. In general there are two kinds of sauces for fish and seafood: (1) Sauces that are carriers of flavors that accent the peculiar characteristics of the fish but have very little relation to it; such as tartare sauce, mayonnaise and its variations, catsup, chili sauce, hollandaise, cucumber sauce, gooseberry sauce, Worcestershire and similar bottled sauces, such as A-1 sauce, Harvey's and the many English commercial sauces, horseradish sauce, a few drops of Tabasco, etc. (2) Sauces that completely harmonize with the fish, since they contain some of its essence, or the broth or flavor of other harmonizing fish or seafood, such as velvet sauce, oyster sauce, caviar sauce, anchovy sauce, shrimp sauce, etc. Practically all sauces in either category are improved by including one of the herbs that go most happily with fish, that is dill, fennel, borage, parsley or chervil. In fact the herb touch is next in importance to the essential dash of lemon or lime juice. And for many of us the best combined sauce and relish for camp is a big juicy dill pickle. (Some of the material in this section is from Fish and Seafood and other food books by the Browns.)