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Anchovies on Toast with Cheese

Anchovies on toast with cheese is a savory sandwich made with anchovy mixture, cheese, and herbs spread between buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Anchovies on Toast with Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Bone, scale, and clean the anchovies without washing them.

  2. Chop the anchovies finely with watercress, mustard cress, lettuce, egg yolks, and cheese.

  3. Season the mixture with cayenne, salt, and mace.

Assemble the toasts

  1. Toast the bread slices and butter them while hot.

  2. Let the buttered toast cool completely, then spread the anchovy mixture between two pieces like a sandwich.

  3. Optionally, add finely chopped olives to the mixture for extra flavor.

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. Watercress + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Watercress + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together293 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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 umami base that gives the spread its main flavour.
Egg yolks
Enrich the mixture and help bind the chopped ingredients into a spreadable paste.
Stilton or parmesan cheese
Adds salty, savoury depth and helps the filling hold together.
Bread
Forms a crisp, sturdy base that holds the filling in place.
Butter
Adds richness and a fatty layer that flavours the toast and separates it from the filling.

The step that matters

Let the buttered toast cool completely. Hot toast melts the butter and softens the bread, and warm filling wilts the greens, so the sandwich turns soggy and greasy. Cooling lets the butter set and the toast firm up before the spread goes on.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (watercress, mustard, lettuce, egg, parmesan cheese, pepper, bread):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against watercress, mustard, lettuce, egg, parmesan cheese, pepper, bread. 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.

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