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Sauce

Anchovy Sauce

A spicy anchovy sauce made by pounding anchovies, simmering with water, sieving, and mixing with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Anchovy Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the anchovy base

  1. Pound the anchovies in a mortar until they form a pulp.

  2. Add a little water to the mortar and shake it.

  3. Transfer the pulp to a saucepan and stew over low heat.

  4. Add the Cayenne pepper and rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

Finish the sauce

  1. Mix the strained sauce with melted butter until smooth.

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. Pepper + buttertop 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
Break down into a pulp to provide the sauce's savoury, salty backbone.
Melted butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded texture.
Cayenne pepper
Adds heat and a sharp, peppery aroma that cuts through the richness.

The step that matters

Rubbing the mixture through a fine sieve. Pressing the stewed pulp through a fine sieve removes fibrous and coarse bits, so the final sauce is smooth rather than grainy.

“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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