Skip to main content
Main

Anchovies, Potted

A paste of anchovies, butter, mace, and cayenne, pounded and sieved.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,405 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Anchovies, Potted

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the paste

  1. Scrape the anchovies very clean.

  2. Pound the anchovies in a mortar to a paste.

  3. Rub the paste through a fine sieve.

Finish the paste

  1. Return the paste to the mortar and pound again with an equal weight of fresh butter.

  2. For a milder paste, increase the amount of butter.

  3. Add mace and cayenne to taste.

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 + macetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Butter and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,405 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 base and the main body of the paste.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth, spreadable texture and carries the flavours.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice note.
Cayenne
Adds a gentle background heat.

The step that matters

Pounding the paste with the butter. The butter must be worked fully into the anchovy paste so it becomes smooth and spreadable. If it is not blended thoroughly, the paste can look greasy or grainy and separate when spread.

“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.

You might also like

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