Skip to main content
Main

Anchovy Sauce

A savory sauce of anchovies, butter, lemon juice, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

  1. Melt ½ cup of butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. Add 6 anchovies and stir until dissolved.

  3. Mix in 2 tablespoons of lemon juice.

  4. Season with black pepper and ¼ teaspoon of coarse sea salt to taste.

  5. Serve warm over fish or vegetables.

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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Melt into the butter to add deep, savory, salty flavor that makes the sauce taste richer.
Butter
Provides fat that carries the flavors and gives the sauce a smooth, rich body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the butter and anchovies.

The step that matters

Dissolving the anchovies over low heat. Gentle heat lets the anchovies break down into the melted butter without scorching. Butter that browns or burns turns bitter, and high heat can make the anchovies tough and grainy, so the sauce stays smooth only when the heat is kept low and the anchovies are stirred until they disappear.

“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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes