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Anchovy Wine

Anchovy wine is a preserved anchovy mixture flavored with wine, vinegar, spices, and aromatics.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Anchovy Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the anchovies

  1. Wash the anchovies in white wine vinegar.

  2. Chop or pound the anchovies, bones included.

  3. Simmer the anchovies in sherry and claret for 15 minutes.

Make the liquor

  1. Strain the vinegar into the mixture.

  2. Add white wine, shallots, ginger, black pepper, Jamaica pepper, nutmeg, lemon peel, and mace.

  3. Boil the mixture for 30 minutes.

  4. Pour off the liquid and let it cool.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the mixture in perfectly dried bottles rinsed with a drop of spirits, cork tightly, and seal.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. White wine + sherrytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  5. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Provide the savoury, salty backbone of the liquid, and their bones break down during pounding and simmering.
White wine vinegar
Adds acidity that helps draw flavour out of the anchovies and spices.
Shallots
Contribute a mild savoury sweetness and aromatic depth to the liquor.
Sherry
Adds body and a rounded, nutty note while extracting flavour from the anchovies.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for 30 minutes. Boiling extracts flavour from the bones and spices and concentrates the liquid, but it also reduces the volume. Keeping the pot at a steady boil for the full time, then straining well, gives a clear, well-flavoured liquor that keeps better in the bottle.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white wine, vinegar, sherry, clove, pepper, nutmeg, lemon):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, vinegar, sherry, clove, pepper, nutmeg, lemon. 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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