Name: Anchovy Sauce
Ingredients: ½ cup essence of anchovy; 2 tablespoons lemon juice

Why it works: Anchovy and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,080 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Anchovy Sauce

Ingredients

½ cup essence of anchovy
2 tablespoons lemon juice

Directions

Combine the anchovy essence and lemon juice in a bowl and stir until well mixed.

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.

Anchovy + lemontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,080 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

Anchovy essence: Provides the salty, savoury anchovy flavour that defines the sauce.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the saltiness of the anchovy.

“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.