Skip to main content
Main

Anchovy Sauce

A sauce made from anchovies, butter, vinegar, water, flour, and cold water, strained and served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Anchovy Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove the bones from the anchovies and mash them with the butter until smooth.

  2. Add the vinegar and water, then bring to a boil.

  3. Thicken the sauce by mixing the flour with a little cold water, then add it to the boiling mixture.

  4. Strain the sauce through a sieve and serve hot.

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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + vinegartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Vinegar + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,652 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Provide the salty, savoury flavour that defines the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body when mashed with the anchovies.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as it heats, giving the sauce body.
Vinegar
Adds a sharp acidity that brightens the rich, salty flavours.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture to the boiling liquid. Flour must be mixed smoothly with cold water first, then stirred into boiling liquid. Adding dry flour directly causes lumps, and the starch only thickens fully once the mixture is hot enough to gelatinise it.

“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.

More anchovy sauce recipes

for Fish 3for Steaks 3 See all 155 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes