Sealed, numbered and signed by the hand that made it.
THE SEA
Twelve-month salt-cured anchovies set into churned cultured butter.
$38
Salted anchovy is the direct descendant of garum, the fermented fish sauce that seasoned nearly every Roman dish and was traded in amphorae from Pompeii to Hadrian's Wall. When the Empire's garum works fell silent, the salting barrels remained, and the Ligurian and Cantabrian coasts kept the craft alive through the Middle Ages.
Butter as a preserving medium is northern rather than southern. Before refrigeration, potting under clarified butter was the standard English and Irish method for keeping fish and shellfish through a season — the ancestor of potted shrimp and of this jar.
Anchovy butter — beurre d'anchois — is codified in Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire (1903) as a compound butter of the classical repertoire. It survives in the great grill rooms: it is what makes the steak at Bocca di Lupo and at Hawksmoor taste the way it does, and Fergus Henderson's St. John made potted, salted fish fashionable again in the 1990s.
Twelve months is not a marketing number. Under six, the fillet is still fishy and firm; somewhere past ten it turns nutty and slightly sweet as the proteins break down into free amino acids. That is the flavour we are buying.
The butter is churned from cream ripened forty-eight hours, which gives it a slight lactic tang that stops the anchovy reading as pure salt. We set it fast and cold so the fillets stay where the packer laid them.
Salt-cure, then butter-set
12 months cure
Room temperature on hot toast, or melted over a steak at the last second.
Every defining ingredient, named: who grew or caught it, where, when it was taken, what it has meant to the people who kept it, and what it does for you.
Caught April 2025, cured twelve months
Churned weekly, winter 2025
Nutrition figures are typical values for the ingredient itself and are given as a guide, not as a dietary claim. Harvest dates refer to the batch printed on your lid.
