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The Housewife's Toasts

A toasted bread topped with a creamy anchovy spread and garnished with olives and garden cress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 624 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

The Housewife's Toasts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Cut stale bread into rounds using a 2‑inch cutter.

  2. Fry the rounds in boiling fat until golden, then drain and let cool.

Make the anchovy spread

  1. In a mortar, combine cream cheese, butter, anchovies, capers, mustard, salt, and Nepal pepper.

  2. Pound the mixture, adding cream until it reaches jam‑like consistency.

  3. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve.

Assemble and serve

  1. Spread the mixture on the fried bread rounds using a warm palette knife.

  2. Garnish each with an olive and sprinkle with garden cress.

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. Capers + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Cream cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,747 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Forms the crisp base that holds the spread.
Cream cheese
Adds creamy body and mild richness to the spread.
Butter
Adds fat for smooth texture and rich flavour.
Anchovies
Provide the salty, savoury flavour that defines the spread.
Capers
Add sharp acidity that brightens the rich spread.
Mustard
Adds sharpness that balances the richness of the fat.

The step that matters

Frying the bread rounds until golden. Frying dries the bread and browns its surface, creating a crisp base. Underfrying leaves it soft and soggy under the spread, while overfrying makes it bitter and brittle.

Swap the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, sugar, cream cheese, butter, mustard, pepper, cream):

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Capersthe original
  3. Cinnamonfits about as well
  4. Celeryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, cream cheese, butter, mustard, pepper, cream. 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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