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Anchovy Fingers

Small anchovy pieces on buttered toast fingers, seasoned with parsley, shallot, pepper, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Anchovy Fingers

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Remove the bones from the anchovies and wash them in warm water.

  2. Cut the toast into fingers and sprinkle with shallot and parsley.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place an anchovy on each toast finger.

  2. Add a few drops of lemon juice and season with Krona pepper and white pepper.

  3. Top each with a small piece of butter.

  4. Heat in the oven at 400°F (200°C) until hot 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.

  1. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 is the main point of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture as it melts over the toast in the oven.
Shallot
Adds a mild, sharp onion-like aroma and flavour to the toast.
Buttered toast
Forms the crisp base that carries the toppings.

The step that matters

Heating in the oven until hot. Heating only until the butter melts and the toast is hot keeps the toast crisp and the anchovies tender. Overheating dries the toast and makes the anchovies tough and bitter.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, shallot, butter, pepper, lemon):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, shallot, butter, pepper, lemon. 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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