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Anchovy Sauce

A sauce made from anchovies, butter, horseradish, mustard, sugar, vinegar or olive oil, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. 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 a teacup of drawn butter.

Make the sauce

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

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

  3. Add cayenne pepper and a squeeze of lemon.

  4. Pour into a sauce tureen.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,279 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Horseradish + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together437 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Lemon + turmerictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,192 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Provide the savory, salty flavor that forms the base of the sauce.
Drawn butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded texture.
Horseradish
Contributes sharp, pungent heat and aroma.
Vinegar or olive oil
Adds acidity or fat, balancing the richness and sharpness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture until it comes to a boil. Heating the butter-based sauce too fast can cause it to separate or scorch. Beating keeps the emulsion smooth and evenly heated as it reaches a boil.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, horseradish, mustard, sugar, vinegar, turmeric):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Mangofits less well
  4. Avocadofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, horseradish, mustard, sugar, vinegar, turmeric. 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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