Name: Anchovy Sauce
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon butter; 1 teaspoon anchovy essence

Why it works: Butter and anchovy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,697 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Anchovy Sauce

Ingredients

1 tablespoon butter
1 teaspoon anchovy essence

Directions

Mix the butter and anchovy essence together until well combined.
Store the mixture in the refrigerator for general use.

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.

Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,697 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter: Adds richness and a smooth, spreadable texture that carries the anchovy flavour.
Anchovy essence: Provides the concentrated salty, savoury anchovy flavour that defines the sauce.

“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.