Skip to main content
Main

Anchovies

A dish of anchovies coated in flour and Chablis, fried until bright brown and seasoned with cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Olive and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,263 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Anchovies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Thicken the olive oil and Chablis with flour until a fairly thick paste forms.

  2. Clean and bone the anchovies without dividing them.

  3. Dip the anchovies in the paste.

Fry

  1. Fry the anchovies until they are a bright brown, adding a sprinkle of cayenne pepper during the process.

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. Olive + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,263 recipes

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

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + olivetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,871 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Provide the main savory, salty fish flavor and the body of the dish.
Flour
Thickens the oil and wine into a paste that coats the fish and helps it brown.
Chablis
Adds acidity and a wine flavor to the coating paste.
Olive oil
Adds fat that carries flavor and helps the coating fry to a golden brown.

The step that matters

Fry until bright brown. The flour and wine coating browns through the Maillard reaction, which builds color and flavor. Anchovies cook quickly, so leaving them too long dries the fish and makes the coating bitter.

“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 fried anchovies recipes

in Batter 6 See all 15 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes