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Anchovy Sauce

Anchovy sauce made by blending anchovies with butter, water, vinegar, and flour, then thickening and straining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Anchovy Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Beat the anchovies in a mortar with the butter until smooth.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a saucepan and add water, vinegar, and flour.

  3. Stir over heat until thickened, then strain through a coarse sieve.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + vinegartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Vinegar + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,652 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Dissolve into the butter to give the sauce a deep, savory flavor.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats with the liquid.
Vinegar
Adds sharpness that balances the richness of the butter and anchovies.

The step that matters

Stir over heat until thickened. Flour needs to be heated with the liquid long enough to swell and thicken; stopping too early leaves a thin sauce with a raw floury taste, while overheating can make it lumpy or scorch on the pan bottom.

“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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