Name: Anchovy Toast
Ingredients: anchovy fillets; equal weight of fresh butter; toast or rusks

Why it works: Anchovy and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,697 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Anchovy Toast

Ingredients

anchovy fillets
equal weight of fresh butter
toast or rusks

Directions

Prepare

Remove the bones and skins from the anchovy fillets.

Make and serve

Pound the anchovy meat in a mortar with an equal weight of fresh butter.
Spread the mixture on hot or cold toast, or on rusks.

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.

Anchovy + buttertop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,697 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovy fillets: Provide the salty, savoury flavour that defines the spread.
Fresh butter: Adds fat and smooth texture, binding the pounded anchovy into a spreadable paste.

“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.