We study relations between hydrodynamical (H) and scalar field (SF) models of the dark energy in the early Universe. Main attention is paid to SF described by the canonical Lagrangian within the homogeneous isotropic spatially flat cosmology. We analyze requirements that guarantee the same cosmological history for the SF and H-models at least for solutions with specially chosen initial conditions and we present a differential equation for the SF potential that ensures such a restricted equivalence of the SF and H-models. Also, we derived a condition that guarantees an approximate equivalence when there is a small difference between energy momentum tensors of the models. The equivalent scalar field potentials for linear equations of state (EOS) are found in an explicit form, we also present an examples with more complicated EOS.