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Anchovy Sauce

Anchovy sauce made by soaking anchovies, simmering, straining, adding vinegar and butter, served with boiled fish or meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,405 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Anchovy Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Soak the anchovies in cold water for 2 hours.

  2. Place the anchovies in a stewpan with 1 pint of cold water and simmer until dissolved.

  3. Strain the liquid, then add 3 tablespoons of vinegar and 1 cup of melted butter.

  4. Simmer for an additional 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled fish or meat.

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. Butter + macetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Vinegar + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Vinegar + macetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,415 recipes

Butter and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,405 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

Anchovies
Dissolve into the liquid to give the sauce a deep, savory, salty flavor base.
Melted butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and balances the savory anchovy flavor.

The step that matters

Simmer until the anchovies dissolve. Gentle simmering lets the anchovies break down fully into the water. If the heat is too high or the cooking is cut short, fragments remain and the sauce tastes gritty or uneven.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, butter):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, butter. 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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