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Anchovy Baskets

Hard‑boiled eggs filled with a seasoned anchovy essence and butter mixture, served on toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and watercress work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 983 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Anchovy Baskets

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Boil the eggs for 20 minutes, then place them in cold water.

  2. Shell and cut the eggs in half lengthwise, removing the yolks.

Make the filling

  1. Pound the yolks with the butter, anchovy essence, and cayenne, adding seasoning if necessary.

  2. Rub the mixture through a wire sieve.

  3. Pipe the mixture into the egg whites.

Assemble and serve

  1. Sprinkle the mixture with chopped parsley.

  2. Place a stalk of parsley in each basket to represent a handle.

  3. Slip each basket onto a piece of cold fried bread or buttered toast.

  4. Garnish with watercress.

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. Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Egg + anchovytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,330 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Watercress + anchovytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together63 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  4. Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Pepper + anchovytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,232 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

Eggs
Egg whites form the edible basket that holds the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the yolk filling.
Anchovy essence
Adds a salty, savoury depth of flavour to the filling.

The step that matters

Rubbing the yolk mixture through a wire sieve. Pressing the pounded yolks through a sieve breaks up lumps and makes the filling fine and smooth, so it pipes evenly and does not clog the nozzle or leave a grainy texture.

“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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