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Anchovies, to Fillet

Anchovy fillets cooked in a butter and flour sauce with capers and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Anchovies, to Fillet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the anchovies

  1. Wash the anchovies, cut off the heads and fins, scrape the skin, and split them open.

  2. Remove the backbone and cut each fillet in two.

  3. Season with cayenne pepper and use for sandwiches.

  4. Soak for four hours.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour with a wooden spoon.

  3. Add the water and bring to a boil.

  4. Add the chopped anchovies and bruised capers.

  5. Stir in lemon juice if desired and cook for ten minutes.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Capers + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + caperstop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,088 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts with the flour to form the base of the sauce, adding richness and smooth body.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter and water into a sauce that holds the anchovies and capers.
Anchovies
Provide the salty, savoury flavour that is the main character of the dish.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour. Flour must be cooked into the melted butter before the water is added so it forms a smooth roux; adding it raw or in lumps leads to a pasty, uneven sauce.

“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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