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Sauce

Anchovy Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, flour, milk, lemon juice, anchovy essence, spices, cream, and a touch of carmine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Anchovy Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour smoothly.

  3. Add the pepper, salt, cayenne, and milk gradually, stirring until boiling.

  4. Boil for three minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the lemon juice, essence of anchovy, carmine, and cream.

  2. Make it very 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Butter
Enriches the sauce and forms the base roux with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, coating sauce as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid body of the sauce, thickened by the flour roux.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, softer mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Essence of anchovy
Provides the salty, savoury anchovy flavour that defines the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the milk into the roux. Adding the milk gradually while stirring keeps the flour evenly dispersed, preventing lumps. Bringing the sauce to a boil then lets the starch swell fully and thicken it.

“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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