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Sauce

Anchovy

A sauce made by pounding anchovies with butter and optionally lemon juice and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Anchovy

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pound the anchovies in a mortar with the butter.

  2. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve using the back of a wooden spoon.

  3. Stir the anchovy mixture into the melted butter.

  4. Optionally, add lemon juice and cayenne to taste.

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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Provide a salty, savoury flavour that gives the butter sauce its character.
Butter
Forms the rich base of the sauce and carries the anchovy flavour through it.

The step that matters

Rubbing the mixture through a fine sieve. Pushing the pounded anchovy and butter through a fine sieve breaks down any remaining fibrous bits, so the sauce comes out smooth rather than gritty when stirred into the melted butter.

“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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