Name: Anchovies on Toast
Ingredients: anchovies; milk; butter; thin bread

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 ↓

Anchovies on Toast

Ingredients

anchovies
milk
butter
thin bread

Directions

Prepare the anchovies

Wash the anchovies in milk and dry them.
Remove the bones and fillet each anchovy into two pieces.

Assemble and serve

Place the fillets on strips of thin buttered toast.
Heat in the oven for 1 minute and 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.

Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,466 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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 and the fish that the dish is built around.
Milk: Soaks the anchovies to draw out some salt and mellow their strong flavour.
Butter: Adds richness and fat to the toast and helps it carry the fish flavour.
Thin bread: Forms the crisp base that holds the fillets and soaks up the butter.

“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.