Anchovy

Salt-cured Engraulis encrasicolus — a small oily fish from the Mediterranean, packed in salt for months and then either left in salt or transferred to olive oil. Most cooks meet it twice in a lifetime: once as a flat ribbon on a pizza, where it is doing the wrong job, and once as the invisible saltiness inside a bagna càuda or a puttanesca, where it is doing the right one.

The anchovy is one of the most useful expressions of umami in the European pantry. Melted into warm oil with garlic, it disappears completely — leaving behind only depth. This is its first lesson: the best anchovies are the ones you cannot taste. You taste what they did to everything else.

Two grades worth knowing. Acciughe sotto sale — salt-cured, packed in glass — are the working anchovies of an Italian kitchen, filleted and rinsed before use. Acciughe del Mar Cantabrico from the north coast of Spain are something else: smaller, fattier, packed in olive oil by hand, and meant to be eaten standing up, on a piece of buttered bread, with a glass of something cold.

The anchovy is structurally close to shoyu and to fish sauce — three different cultures arriving at the same answer, which is that a small fermented fish is one of the most efficient ways to make food taste like more of itself.