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Anchovy Sauce

A sauce made by pounding anchovies with butter and mixing with espagnole sauce or melted butter, lemon juice or vinegar, and optional wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,157 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Anchovy Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

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

  2. Stir the anchovies into half a pint of espagnole sauce or melted butter.

  3. Add lemon juice or vinegar to taste.

  4. Alternatively, stir in a tablespoon of essence of anchovy into half a pint of melted butter.

  5. Pound the anchovies in a little wine or vinegar and work them into melted butter or any plain sauce.

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. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Sauce + lemontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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 flavour that defines the sauce.
Butter
Forms the rich base that carries the anchovy flavour and gives the sauce body.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the saltiness of the anchovies.

The step that matters

Working the anchovies into the sauce. Anchovies pounded well into butter or a warm sauce dissolve and spread their flavour evenly. If left in pieces or added to a sauce that is too hot, the flavour can be uneven or the butter can separate.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Grapefits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sauce, wine. 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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