Neapolitan Anchovy Sauce

Neapolitan anchovy sauce is a delicious, creamy sauce, perfect for meat or vegetables.

This page incorporates text from the public domain cookbook The Cook’s Decameron: A Study In Taste, Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes by Emily Waters.

Ingredients

  • 3 anchovies
  • 1 teaspoon fennel, chopped
  • 1 pinch cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon parsley, chopped
  • 1 teaspoon marjoram, chopped
  • 1 teaspoon flour
  • 1 clove garlic, split
  • 1 dash of lemon juice
  • 1 dash of vinegar
  • ½ gill cream, boiled
  • Bones of 1 fish
Neapolitan Anchovy Sauce

Photo: Frank Fox / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Procedure

  1. Wash anchovies in vinegar; bone and pound with fennel and a cinnamon using a mortar and pestle.
  2. Mix in parsley and marjoram, a squeeze of lemon juice, flour, cream, and the bones of the fish for which you will use this sauce.
  3. Pass through a sieve, add garlic, and boil.

Notes, tips, and variations

  • If the fish you are using is cooked in the oven, add a little of the liquor in which it has been cooked to the sauce.
  • Take out the garlic before serving.
  • Instead of anchovies you may use caviar, pickled tunny, or any other pickled fish.