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Anchovy Paste

A preserved anchovy paste made by pounding anchovies, sieving, and coating with clarified butter, optionally flavored with mustard flour, pickled walnut, spice, or cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 849 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Anchovy Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Pound the anchovies in a mortar.

  2. Rub the pulp through a fine sieve.

Store

  1. Cover the paste with clarified butter.

  2. Store in a cool place.

Use

  1. For immediate use, mix the essence with enough flour to form a paste.

  2. Optionally, add mustard flour, a pickled walnut, spice, or cayenne for extra 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. Mustard + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together849 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 main salty, savory flavor of the paste.
Clarified butter
Covers the paste to limit contact with air and help it keep.
Flour
Thickens the anchovy essence into a paste for immediate use.

Swap the mustard

The recipe marks mustard as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, walnut):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, walnut. 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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