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Sauce

Anchovy Sauce

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

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 them up and stew in a little water for 20 minutes.

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

Make and serve the sauce

  1. Pour everything into a saucepan and heat on the stove.

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

  3. Pour into a sauce tureen and 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 savoury, salty depth.
Drawn butter
Provides fat and a rich, smooth body that carries the other flavours.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and balances the saltiness.

The step that matters

Beating the mixture as it heats. Butter emulsions can separate if overheated or left to boil hard. Beating keeps the fat and liquid blended into a smooth sauce as it comes to a boil.

“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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