Put a tin of anchovies in front of most American home cooks and watch what happens. Some will confidently open it and reach for the olive oil. But a significant portion will pause, remember a bad experience with a too-fishy pizza, and gently push the tin to the side. This is a cooking tragedy, because anchovies — properly used — are not a fishy ingredient. They are an umami ingredient, a salt ingredient, a depth ingredient. When they dissolve into a warm pan of olive oil and garlic, they cease to taste like fish entirely. They taste like everything in the pan becoming more intensely itself.
The fear is understandable but historically strange, because traditional European cooking from Portugal to Greece has leaned on cured anchovies as a basic pantry item for centuries. The à la niçoise of Provence, the Spanish boquerones, the Piedmontese bagna cauda, the Neapolitan pizza alle acciughe — anchovies appear in every coastal tradition and many inland ones. The Romans made garum, their essential seasoning sauce, from fermented anchovies. The fish has been feeding and flavoring European tables since antiquity.
How to Actually Use Them
The technique that converts skeptics: warm two tablespoons of good olive oil in a small pan over medium-low heat. Add three or four anchovy fillets and a clove of thinly sliced garlic. Stir gently as the anchovies dissolve — they will melt into the oil within two or three minutes, leaving no recognizable fish shape, only a rich, golden, intensely savory oil. Pour this over roasted cauliflower, broccoli, or potatoes. Toss with pasta and parsley. Use it as the base of a braise. The finished dish will not taste of fish. It will taste of something you can’t quite identify but want more of. That’s the anchovy doing its job.
Used in their whole form, good anchovy fillets — properly cured, packed in olive oil — have a meatiness and complexity that pairs beautifully with simple companions: crusty bread, butter, sliced radishes, a hard-boiled egg. This is a French and Spanish antipasto tradition of great elegance. The key is quality: the difference between a good tin of Spanish anchovies packed in olive oil and a cheap tin packed in vegetable oil is significant. The former is a delicacy. The latter is where the bad reputation originates.
The Best Anchovies to Know
Cantabrian anchovies (from northern Spain, the Bay of Biscay) are the benchmark for the category. Fat, meaty, cured for a minimum of six months in salt, then cleaned, filleted by hand, and packed in olive oil. They are significantly more expensive than commodity anchovies and worth every cent. Cetara anchovies from the Amalfi Coast are the Italian equivalent: same hand-processing tradition, more assertive curing, used for both direct eating and for making colatura. Sicilian anchovies, sold salt-packed in glass jars, are the cook’s anchovy — rinse off the salt and fillet them yourself, or use them whole in braises and sauces where they have time to fully dissolve.
The Pasta Dish Every Italian Knows
Spaghetti aglio, olio, e acciughe: boil spaghetti. In a wide pan, warm olive oil with four cloves of sliced garlic and six anchovy fillets. Let the garlic turn pale gold and the anchovies dissolve. Add a ladleful of pasta water and a pinch of chili flake. Drain the pasta 90 seconds early and finish cooking it in the pan, adding pasta water as needed to create a loose, silky sauce. Serve immediately with breadcrumbs toasted in olive oil and a small handful of chopped parsley. This dish has four real ingredients and will be better than most restaurant pasta you’ve eaten. The anchovy is why.
