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Anchovy Toast

Anchovy toast is bread spread with anchovy butter and garnished with parsley or pickles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Anchovy Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the anchovies

  1. Remove bones and skin from anchovies.

  2. Wash anchovies.

  3. Split 3 anchovies.

  4. Quarter additional anchovies.

  5. Wash additional anchovies.

Make the anchovy butter

  1. Pound them with 2 tablespoons fine butter until smooth.

  2. Pound them with some fresh butter.

  3. Rub through a fine sieve.

Prepare and assemble the toast

  1. Cut slices of bread into desired shapes.

  2. Fry slices in clarified butter until golden.

  3. Spread anchovy mixture on toast or rusks.

  4. Spread anchovy butter on cooled toast.

  5. Lay them on the toast.

  6. Garnish with parsley or pickles.

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

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

  2. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Bread + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 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
Provide the main salty, savoury flavour of the spread and the topping.
Fine butter
Pounded with the anchovies to make a smooth, spreadable mixture with rich fat.
Bread
Forms the crisp base that holds the anchovy spread.
Clarified butter
Fries the bread slices to a golden, browned crust.

The step that matters

Pound the anchovies until smooth, then rub through a fine sieve. Pounding breaks the anchovy flesh into a paste, and sieving removes remaining fibres and lumps so the spread turns silky rather than grainy.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Sagefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, 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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