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Cheese and Anchovy Sandwich

A sandwich with cheese blended with butter, mustard, pepper, salt, and anchovy, spread on bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cheese and Anchovy Sandwich

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Pound the cheese with butter, mustard, black pepper, and salt until smooth.

  2. Pass the anchovy through a sieve and mix it into the cheese mixture.

  3. If too thick, add a little more butter and mix thoroughly.

  4. Dust with Nepaul pepper.

Assemble

  1. Spread the mixture on bread and assemble the sandwich.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cheese + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Anchovy + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,260 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Cheese
Forms the creamy base of the filling and carries the other flavours.
Butter
Adds fat and moisture, making the pounded mixture smooth and spreadable.
Made mustard
Adds sharp, acidic bite that cuts through the richness of the cheese and butter.
Anchovy
Contributes salty, savoury depth to the filling.

The step that matters

Pounding the cheese with butter until smooth. Working the cheese and butter together until smooth gives an even, spreadable texture. If the mixture is too thick, adding a little more butter loosens it, as the record advises.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, butter, pepper, anchovy, bread):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, butter, pepper, anchovy, bread. 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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