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Anchovy Canapes

Anchovy canapes are small toasted bread rounds topped with anchovy fillets and a mixture of boiled egg whites and yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

Anchovy Canapes

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the croutons

  1. Cut the bread into ⅓-inch thick slices and stamp out small rounds.

  2. Fry the rounds in butter until golden brown.

Prepare the toppings

  1. Bone and fillet the anchovies.

  2. Boil the eggs hard.

Assemble the canapés

  1. Curl two fillets on each crouton.

  2. Fill the center with chopped egg white and sieved egg yolk.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 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

Stale bread
Forms the crisp base that holds the toppings without going soggy.
Anchovies
Provide salty, savoury flavour that stands out against the rich egg.
Eggs
Hard-boiled whites and yolks add a soft, creamy topping contrast.
Butter
Browns in the pan to add rich flavour and golden colour to the croutons.

The step that matters

Fry the rounds in butter until golden brown. Frying until deeply golden drives off surface moisture and browns the bread, making it crisp enough to hold the toppings without softening.

“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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