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Anchovy Paste, or Le Beurre D' Anchois

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 849 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Anchovy Paste, or Le Beurre D' Anchois

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pound the anchovies in a mortar.

  2. Rub the pounded anchovies through a fine sieve.

  3. Pot the mixture and cover it with clarified butter.

  4. Keep it in a cool place.

  5. For a quick version, mix essence of anchovy with enough flour to make a paste.

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 + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together849 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

Swap the mustard

The recipe marks mustard as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, walnut):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, walnut. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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