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Sauce

Essence of Anchovy

A thick sauce made by boiling stale ale with pickled herrings, horseradish, flour, and optional bole armeniac.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 743 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Essence of Anchovy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the herrings and ale

  1. Boil the stale ale for 30 minutes and let it cool.

  2. Remove the heads and roes from the pickled herrings and mince them finely.

  3. Add the minced herrings and horseradish to the cooled ale and boil for 20 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Strain the mixture into a clean frying pan and dry it over the fire.

  2. Add the flour to the pan and stir until it turns the color of essence of anchovies.

  3. Combine the strained liquor with the flour mixture and bring to a boil.

  4. Let it boil for 15 minutes, then bottle it when cool.

  5. If the color is insufficient, add a little bole armeniac.

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 + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale ale
Forms the liquid base that carries the herring and horseradish flavour.
Pickled herrings
Supply the salty, savoury anchovy-like flavour that defines the sauce.
Flour
Toasted in the pan to brown and thicken the sauce and add a roasted note.
Horseradish
Adds a sharp, pungent aroma that mellows during the long boil.

The step that matters

Drying the strained mixture in the pan. Drying over the fire must be watched closely, because overheating can scorch the liquid and give a bitter, burnt taste. Flour added afterward browns quickly, so colour should be checked as it changes rather than trusted to a set time.

“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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