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Sauce

Anchovy Sauce

A sauce made from soaked anchovies, butter, cayenne pepper, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Anchovy Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the anchovies

  1. Soak the anchovies in cold water for several hours.

  2. Cut up the anchovies and stew them in a little water for 20 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture into 1 teacup of drawn butter.

Make and serve the sauce

  1. Pour the mixture into a saucepan and heat it on the stove.

  2. Beat the sauce until it comes to a boil.

  3. Pour the sauce into a serving tureen.

  4. Add cayenne pepper and a squeeze of lemon.

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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Dissolve into the butter to give the sauce its salty, savoury depth.
Drawn butter
Forms the rich fat base that carries the flavour and gives a smooth texture.
Lemon
Adds a bright acidity that balances the salty and rich flavours.

The step that matters

Beat the sauce until it comes to a boil. Heating the butter and anchovy mixture too hard or unevenly can make the butter separate or scorch. Beating keeps the emulsion smooth as it heats.

“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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