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Canapes of Anchovies

A canapé featuring anchovy paste, olives, fried bread squares, and garnishes of egg, beetroot, and watercress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Beetroot and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 143 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Canapes of Anchovies

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the paste

  1. Pound the anchovies with butter, egg yolk, cayenne, and lemon juice until smooth.

  2. Stuff the mixture into the olives.

Assemble the canapés

  1. Fry the bread squares until golden.

  2. On each square, place two anchovy fillets to form a square.

  3. Top each with a stuffed olive.

  4. Chop the whites and yolks of the hard boiled eggs, beetroot, and watercress separately.

  5. Arrange a little heap of each on the squares.

  6. Serve.

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. Beetroot + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together143 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lemon + watercresstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Lemon + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Provide the main savoury, salty flavour that defines the canapé.
Butter
Adds fat that softens the anchovy paste and gives it a smooth, spreadable texture.
Hard boiled egg yolk
Enriches the paste, adding richness and body to bind it smooth.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich anchovy and butter flavours.
Fried bread
Gives a crisp, golden base that holds the toppings without going soggy.

The step that matters

Pounding the paste until smooth. Thorough pounding breaks down the anchovy and butter into a uniform paste. Lumps would make the stuffing uneven and hard to pipe or pack into the olives.

Swap the beetroot

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

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Beetrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, pepper, lemon, olive, bread, watercress. 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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