Name: Savory Toast
Ingredients: ½ cup butter; 2 teaspoons mustard; ⅓ cup vinegar (preferably walnut pickling vinegar); 2 teaspoons anchovy sauce; pepper to taste; ¼ pound cheese, broken into pieces; toasted bread

Why it works: Anchovy and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,057 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Savory Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Melt the butter in a saucepan.
Add mustard, vinegar, anchovy sauce, and pepper; stir until dissolved.
Spread the mixture on toasted bread 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.

Anchovy + saucetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,057 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together14,067 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,962 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Mustard + walnuttop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together849 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together15,430 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter: Melts to carry the other flavours and give the spread a rich, smooth body.
Vinegar: Adds sharp acidity that cuts through the butter and brightens the flavour.
Mustard: Adds sharp pungency and helps hold the mixture together as it dissolves.
Anchovy sauce: Adds deep savoury, salty flavour that gives the spread its umami character.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, mustard, vinegar, anchovy, sauce, pepper, cheese):

Beansfits about as well
Walnutthe original
Sesamefits about as well
Chestnutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, mustard, vinegar, anchovy, sauce, pepper, cheese. 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.