Name: Anchovies on Toast
Ingredients: anchovies; milk; butter; bread

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Anchovies on Toast

Ingredients

anchovies
milk
butter
bread

Directions

Prepare the anchovies

Wash the anchovies in milk and dry them.
Remove the bones and fillet each anchovy into two fillets.

Assemble and serve

Place the fillets on strips of thin buttered toast.
Heat in the oven for 1 minute and serve.

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.

Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,466 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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 is the centre of the dish.
Milk: Soaks the anchovies to draw out salt and mellow their strong flavour.
Butter: Adds fat and richness to the toast and helps it brown lightly.
Bread: Forms the crisp base that carries the anchovy fillets.

“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.