Hi, it's Alexa Yabel from New York Times cooking. We've got tons of easy weeknight recipes, and today I'm making my five-ingredient Creamy Miso pasta. You just take your starchy pasta water, whisk it together with a little bit of miso and butter until it's creamy. Add your noodles and a little bit of cheese. It's like a grown-up box of mac and cheese. That feels like a restaurant-quality dish. New York Times cooking has you covered with easy dishes for busy weeknights. You can find more at nytcooking. Com.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

I think right now, anchovies are having a moment, both in the culinary world and culturally. My name is Christopher Beckman, and I'm an archeologist working primarily in the Middle East, but I've gotten a little sidetracked the last number of years on anchovies, and I wrote a book called A Twist in the Tale: How the Humble Anchovy Flaved Western Cuisine. I think People are getting very excited right now about anchovies because as we move towards a more plant-forward future, anchovies have an incredible role to play in this new chapter in how we feed ourselves. I'm seeing a number of chefs consistently talking about them. For instance, Allison Roman talks about an anchovie almost every week.

A beautiful, perfect roast chicken that's been slathered in anchovies butter with a hyperacidic- Nigella Lawson had a whole chapter devoted to anchovies in her last book.

Melissa Clarke of the New York Times. I always call her the Anchovie Queen.

One, two, three, gorgeous oil-packed anchovies.

Then when you bring in the social media, when you bring in the new companies like Fishwife.

Fishwife makes Tintin fish for hot girls.

A1 packaging.

These companies that are presenting anchovies to a younger generation without the baggage of the past. Rumor has it that even Kamla Harris likes anchovies on her pizza, which I think bodes well for the whole nation.

They are a way to bring a dose of flavor and satisfying taste to plants and grains and vegetables of all different kinds.

And this is something anchovies have been doing for 2,000 years. They go back all the way to ancient Rome when they seasoned almost everything the Romans ate. The form in which they were used was fish sauce, what the Romans called darum. From the Roman era, we see it pop up throughout European history. In France, they became the flavor enhancer of French sauces in the 17 and 1800s. Across the English channel in Britain, they were using it in ketchup, and nobody's embraced anchovies in Europe quite like the Italians, where anchovies never went out of fashion. When we talk about what makes anchovies so special, what we're really talking about is the taste of umami. For most of our history, there were four accepted tastes and flavors. There was basically sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. But in 1908, a very astute Japanese chemist named Ikeida, he hypothesized there was a fifth protein-y, mushroom-y, savour-y taste. Well, after a lot of chemical experiments and reductions, he basically isolated glutamate, which we now know and call umami. This is what makes anchovies so special because they are absolutely packed to the gills with umami. My interest in anchovies really took off.

When I was younger, living in LA in my 20s, flat broke. I would often eat very, very simple food, ramen, simple pastas with tomato and sauce. Basically, to spruce up the tomato sauce, I would add an anchovie. One of the interesting things I noticed was that if I had a friend or two over for dinner, and I told them at the end of the dinner that there was anchovie in it, I could see their eyes glazing over. If I mentioned before dinner, literally a friend or two would just say, No, thanks, I'm not that hungry. I realized very early on there's something very unique about anchovies in that they bring immense flavor to our food, but at the same time, they're loathing by half the population. I think it goes back to the very, very bland diets we tend to give children in the West, because Because if you look at what children in Asia eat, they're all growing up eating anchovies on a daily basis in the form of fish sauce, either dried fish or fresh anchovies. In addition, I think part of the reason why so many people have a bad experience with anchovies is their first experience was as anchovy pizza.

In the US, traditionally, the anchovy pizzas have been terrible. Usually, it's a giant bulk tin of anchovies, the lowest quality sitting in the back of the pizzeria. It's been open for months. Then they're lazily thrown on the pizza and it's served. It's a hot mess, a hot, salty mess, and it turns people off for decades. If there's an anchovy skeptic out there who wants to try anchovies for the first time and is quite nervous, my suggestion is to sauté an anchovy with a little garlic and chili pepper and olive oil. And this trifecta, this golden trifecta of flavor, becomes a background note that can season any vegetable, any pulse, any grain. You can literally add them, and it will reside in the background, and people won't even know they're there, but they'll be working their wonders.

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