Name: Toast of Anchovies
Ingredients: slices of bread; anchovies; butter; cayenne pepper; lemon juice; lard; parsley; shallot; pickles

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Toast of Anchovies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the toast by toasting the slices of bread until golden brown.
Fillet the anchovies and pound them in a mortar.
Mix in softened butter, cayenne pepper, and a few drops of lemon juice.
Spread the anchovy mixture on the toast.
For filled bread, cut thin slices of bread and use a patty cutter to cut out rounds.
Fry the rounds in lard until golden brown.
Fillet and pound more anchovies, adding chopped parsley and a small amount of shallot.
Rub the mixture through a fine sieve and spread it thickly on one piece of fried bread.
Top with another piece of fried bread and garnish with additional filleted anchovies, pickles, or parsley.

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.

Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,737 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,523 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Swap the shallot

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

Shallotthe original
Carrotfits about as well
Capsicumfits less well
Spinachfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, pepper, lemon, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.