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Anchovy Sauce

A sauce made from anchovies, shallot, fish stock, wine, lemon, butter, vinegar, flour, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Anchovy Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a saucepan, combine the anchovies and minced shallot with the fish stock or gravy.

  2. Cook until the anchovies are soft enough to be pounded into a paste.

  3. Strain the mixture and thicken it with the body of the fish, after removing heads, tails, and bones.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add red wine, lemon juice, and butter, and simmer for about 30 minutes.

  2. Alternatively, melt butter in the water used to boil the fish, add vinegar and flour, and stir until thick.

  3. For a quicker version, mix prepared essence of anchovy into melted butter and season with cayenne pepper.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Red wine + vinegartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together575 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  5. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Break down into a paste to give the sauce its savoury, salty flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body to the finished sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when stirred in the hot liquid.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the simmered sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Simmer after adding the wine, lemon and butter. Simmering for about 30 minutes lets the alcohol cook off and the flavours meld, while butter added to a boiling liquid can separate. Keep the heat gentle so the sauce stays smooth.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, fish, red wine, butter, vinegar, flour, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, fish, red wine, butter, vinegar, flour, pepper. 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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