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Anchovy Canapees

A toasted bread appetizer topped with a thick anchovy and egg yolk paste, seasoned with mustard, pepper, herbs, capers, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 624 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Anchovy Canapees

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fry the squares of bread in butter until light golden.

  2. Remove bones from the anchovies and clean them well.

Make the paste

  1. Mince half of the anchovies and pass through a sieve with the yolks of 4 hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Mix the anchovy paste with some butter and oil to form a thick paste.

  3. Add mustard, pepper, chopped parsley, chives, capers, tarragon, and vinegar to the mixture.

Assemble

  1. Spread the mixture on the hot toast.

  2. Top each piece with the remaining anchovies cut into neat strips.

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. Mustard + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Chive + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together245 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mustard + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together587 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Provide the salty, savoury flavour that defines the canapé.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and a soft, creamy body to the paste.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping bind the paste and crisp the bread.
Oil
Loosens the paste and adds smoothness and fat.
Mustard
Adds sharpness that balances the richness of the egg and fat.
Capers
Add briny acidity that cuts through the rich paste.

The step that matters

Frying the bread until light golden. Bread fried in butter browns through Maillard reactions, giving flavour and a crisp base. Frying too long darkens it and makes it bitter, while underdone bread turns soft under the paste.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, egg, pepper, parsley, chive, capers):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, egg, pepper, parsley, chive, capers. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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