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Anchovy Toast

A toasted gluten bread sandwich with anchovies, butter, and watercress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 Toast

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove the bones from the anchovies and place them in the boiling milk for 2 minutes.

  2. Toast the slice of gluten bread and cut it in half between the toasted sides.

  3. Butter the toasted side well.

  4. Dry the anchovies and lay them on the buttered side of the toast.

  5. Butter the other toasted side and place it over the anchovies.

  6. Serve with watercress.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + watercresstop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Butter + watercresstop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Provide the salty, savoury flavour that is the main taste of the toast.
Boiling milk
Softens the anchovies and mellows their salty, fishy edge.
Gluten bread
Forms the base and structure that holds the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the toast brown and taste savoury.

The step that matters

Dry the anchovies before laying them on the toast. Anchovies that have been poached in milk hold moisture. If they are not dried, that moisture soaks into the buttered toast and makes it soggy, so drying them keeps the bread crisp.

“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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