The One About Anchovies

Until this weekend anchovies were a mythical beast, never encountered, but often referred to in popular culture, frequently preceded by “hold the…”, and certainly something I’d avoid if offered.

But then, Thanksgiving.

There was a decision to have a Rukavina family lasagna meal on Saturday. Mike would make the lasagna, from Mom’s recipe, and we would be responsible for the Cæsar salad, the drinks, and the dessert.

“Will you make the salad dressing from scratch?”, Lisa asked, with a tone that suggested that a real adult would, definitely, be making the salad dressing from scratch.

“Of course,” I said, as though that had always been the plan.

The Internet is preloaded to assume anchovy aversion in its presentation of Cæsar salad recipes, often leaving them out entirely, or listing them as “optional.” 

There was also the issue of the heart of the vrai dressing being a raw egg, something that, in the Rukavina culinary universe, was anathema. To say nothing, for some parts of the family at least, of the vehement anti-garlic stance.

Which is to say that my first go at the dressing was a stripped-down version that omitted anchovies, garlic, and eggs altogether. 

This might have you asking “why bother,” and the result was a sort of “watery tasteless mayonnaise” that never fully emulsified. We made the decision to just go with it, put the mason jar of it in the fridge, and went on with the day.

But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t serve that dressing, or at least only that dressing; I felt called to put aside my preconceived notions, and dive all-in.

I found another recipe, this one with no hesitations. I bought the last tin of anchovies at Kent Street Market, and reassembled the other ingredients, this time with garlic and egg. I followed the “immersion blender” version of the instructions. Made a paste of the anchovies and garlic, drizzled in the olive oil. The result was, relatively speaking, divine.

Mindful of my larger family’s preferences, I prepared another version, anchovy and garlic-free. It lacked the kapow of the full version, but was nice and creamy at least.

In our various ways, we enjoyed a lovely Cæsar salad for Thanksgiving, went through three heads of Romaine lettuce, plus some aftermarket leaf lettuce additions when the bowl ran dry.

I feel like I have a new salty fishy kapow-offering friend in my culinary reportoire.

Once you’ve embraced anchovies, they pop up everywhere, it seems.

The very next day’s episode of Jeremy Cherfas’ Eat This Podcast was a deep dive into anchovies and their role in Basque cuisine:

Anchovies can be very divisive; some people absolutely cannot stand them. I can’t get enough of the little blighters. What’s the difference? It might be as simple as the way they’re stored.

At the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium this past summer, I was delighted to learn one crucial way to improve any tin of anchovies: keep it in the fridge until you’re ready to use it.

Marcela Garcés is a professor at Siena College in New York, and as a side hustle she and her husband Yuri Morejón run La Centralita, a culinary studio that aims, among other things, “to teach guests about anchovies as a gourmet food in context”. As a result of our conversation, I now hold anchovies in even higher regard.

It’s worth a listen to the entire episode, as Marcela is engaging and very anchovy-aware. You may emerge, as I did, wanting to book a flight to Bilbao.

And then, again, today.

Patrick Rhone pointed to a book recently published by his tax accountant, A Season for That, that details a 6-month sojourn to the south of France the that author, Steve Hoffman, a food writer and Francophile in addition to accounting for taxes, undertook with his family.

This naturally led me to Hoffman’s blog, where I found a post art and anchovies on the vermillion coast that described an anchovy transition similar to my own. He writes, in part:

But shortly after the turn of the century, I fell in love with Alice Waters. (You might know her as, oh, the chef/owner of Chez Panisse and inventor of the farm-to-table movement, for starters.) It was a long-distance affair, which, if you asked her, she might not remember well. But in its first full bloom, there wasn’t anything she suggested that I wouldn’t try, anchovies included.

Hoffman is a delightful writer. To the point where I’d hire him to be my tax person should I need a tax person in Minnesota.

All of this has me planning a future for my next tin of anchovies.

Maybe you might want to become an anchovy-loving person too?