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Sauce

Anchovy Sauce

A sauce made by pounding anchovies with butter and mixing with melted butter, lemon juice, cayenne, and optional anchovy essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Anchovy Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the anchovy butter

  1. Pound the anchovies with the butter in a mortar.

  2. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve using the back of a wooden spoon.

Finish the sauce

  1. Stir the anchovy mixture into the thick melted butter.

  2. Add lemon juice and cayenne if desired.

  3. Alternatively, stir in essence of anchovies for 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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 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 salty, savoury flavour that defines the sauce.
Butter
Forms the rich base that carries the anchovy flavour and gives the sauce its body.

The step that matters

Rubbing the anchovy mixture through a sieve. Pressing the paste through a fine sieve breaks down fibres and removes lumps, so the anchovy blends smoothly into the butter instead of leaving gritty specks.

“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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