Name: Anchovy Allumettes
Ingredients: puff pastry trimmings; fish stuffing; anchovy butter; cayenne pepper; anchovy fillets

Why it works: Fish and anchovy work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 637 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Anchovy Allumettes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Roll puff pastry trimmings into strips 3 inches wide and 1/10 inch thick.
Spread a thin layer of fish stuffing mixed with anchovy butter and cayenne pepper on the strips.
Lay prepared anchovy fillets lengthwise on the stuffing.
Cut the strips into pieces about 1 inch wide.

Bake

Place the pieces on a baking sheet and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 10 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.

Fish + anchovytop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together637 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,488 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Anchovy + buttertop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,697 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Anchovy + peppertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,232 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Fish + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,948 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Puff pastry trimmings: Provides flaky layers that puff and crisp as the pastry bakes.
Fish stuffing: Adds a savoury filling that bakes into the pastry strips.
Anchovy butter: Adds fat and concentrated salty, savoury anchovy flavour to the filling.
Anchovy fillets: Provide the main fish flavour and a topping that shows on the baked pastry.

“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.