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Anchovy Sauce

A sauce made from anchovies, butter, and vinegar, simmered and stewed, served with boiled fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,513 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Anchovy Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the anchovies

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

  2. Remove the anchovies from the water.

  3. Pull the anchovies into pieces.

  4. Simmer the anchovies in just enough water to cover them for 30 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Strain the liquid into the drawn butter.

  2. Boil for 1 minute.

  3. Add the vinegar.

  4. Heat gradually to a boil.

  5. Stew for 5 more minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled fish.

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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 forms the base of the sauce.
Drawn butter
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty body to the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the rich butter.

The step that matters

Heat gradually to a boil. Bringing the butter-based sauce up to a boil slowly helps keep the emulsion from separating or the butter from scorching, giving a smooth sauce.

“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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