Skip to main content
Sauce

Anchovy Sauce

A sauce made from anchovies, shallot, fish stock, wine, lemon, butter, vinegar, flour, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Anchovy Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Combine anchovies and minced shallot with fish stock or gravy in a saucepan. Boil until soft enough to pound into a paste.

  2. Strain the mixture and thicken it with the body of the fish, after removing the heads, tails, and bones.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add red wine, lemon juice, and butter to the saucepan. Simmer for about 30 minutes.

  2. In another pan, melt butter in the water used to boil the fish. Stir in vinegar and a little flour until thick.

  3. Alternatively, mix 2 or 3 spoonfuls of prepared essence of anchovy into the melted butter and season with cayenne pepper.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Red wine + vinegartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together575 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  5. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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 paste to give the sauce its salty, savoury depth.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter mixture so the sauce becomes body rather than watery.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth, balancing the richness of the butter.
Lemon juice
Brightens the sauce with acidity that cuts through the butter.
Vinegar
Adds sharpness that balances the fat and the savoury anchovy.

The step that matters

Simmering after adding wine, lemon and butter. Butter can separate or turn greasy if it boils hard, so a gentle simmer keeps the emulsion smooth while the flavours meld and the sauce reduces.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, fish, red wine, butter, vinegar, flour, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, fish, red wine, butter, vinegar, flour, pepper. 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.

More anchovy sauce recipes

for Fish 3for Steaks 3 See all 155 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesHot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce for Sweet PuddingsWine Sauce for Sweet Puddings6 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipes