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Cheese Biscuits with Anchovies

Cheese biscuits with anchovies are savory biscuits made with cheese, flour, butter, lard, and anchovy mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cheese Biscuits with Anchovies

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the anchovy filling

  1. Bone the anchovies and pass them through a sieve.

  2. Mix the anchovies with the yolk of a hard-boiled egg, butter, parsley, and cayenne.

Assemble and bake

  1. Spread the mixture between biscuits and place in the oven to heat.

  2. For the biscuits, mix cheese, flour, butter, lard, cayenne, and salt into a light paste with a little water.

  3. Roll out the dough very thin, cut into squares, and bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until light brown.

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

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

  2. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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 a salty, savoury flavour to the filling.
Cheese
Adds savoury flavour and richness to the biscuit dough.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the biscuit dough together.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and rich flavour in the dough and filling.
Lard
Adds fat that keeps the biscuits short and tender.
Egg
The hard-boiled yolk binds the anchovy filling into a smooth paste.

The step that matters

Roll the dough very thin and bake until light brown. Thin dough bakes quickly and becomes crisp. If it is rolled thick, the centre stays doughy. Leaving it in too long dries the biscuits and turns them bitter.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, egg, pepper, cheese, flour):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, pepper, cheese, flour. 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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