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Sauce

Anchovy Sauce

A sauce made by pounding anchovies with butter and mixing into melted butter, optionally flavored with lemon juice, cayenne pepper, or anchovy essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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. Pound the anchovies with a small bit of butter in a mortar.

  2. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve using the back of a wooden spoon.

  3. Stir the anchovy mixture into the thick melted butter.

  4. Optionally, add lemon juice and cayenne pepper to taste.

  5. Alternatively, stir in essence of anchovies for flavor.

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
Provide the salty, savory flavor that defines the sauce.
Thick melted butter
Forms the rich, smooth body of the sauce and carries the anchovy flavor.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a fine sieve. Pounding and sieving breaks the anchovies into a very fine paste, so no fibrous lumps remain and the sauce stays smooth when stirred into the butter.

“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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