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Anchovy-Powder

A dry powder made by crushing toasted anchovy cakes with flour and mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,816 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Anchovy-Powder

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the anchovies

  1. Pound the anchovies in a mortar.

  2. Rub them through a fine sieve.

Make and dry the cakes

  1. Mix with flour and a little mustard powder to form thin cakes.

  2. Toast the cakes until very dry.

Powder and store

  1. Rub the toasted cakes to a powder and store in well-stopped vials.

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. Mustard + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Provide the main savoury, salty flavour of the powder.
Flour
Binds the anchovy paste so it can be formed into thin cakes.
Mustard powder
Adds a sharp, pungent note that rounds out the anchovy flavour.

The step that matters

Toast the cakes until very dry. Any moisture left in the cakes lets the powder clump and spoil, so they must be fully dried before grinding. Drying also gives the powder a concentrated, shelf-stable flavour.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, mustard):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, mustard. 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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