Eat: The Startlingly Flavorful Dressing That Will Boost More Than Just Your Salads

I have three refrigerators in my life: the one you can walk into at the restaurant, with the interior safety-release door clasp and the diamond-plate floor; and the double-door one at home that blooms incandescent light like time-lapse daybreak when you open her. Then there is the one at our weekend getaway place, sturdy but cramped, with shelves that don’t adjust so that you have to store the half-and-half horizontally when the door cubbies are too full of various condiments. Because we get away to that one only on a random Tuesday-through-Wednesday, maybe twice a month, and we can never remember if we’ve run out of Hellman’s up there, those cubbies are chockablock with condimental redundancies. But in each and every one of these three fridges — at any time, on any day of the week, no matter the season or the hour — there is a container of anchovy-garlic-chile dressing on one shelf or another, within reach. It’s usually in a plastic pint container, labeled in blue tape with black Sharpie, and it just says: GH Crack Sauce.

Like everybody else, I’ve often heard that chefs’ home refrigerators are famously empty. Because we work so hard, so long, so late, the mythology suggests, we don’t ever cook at home. Everybody seems to know, and admire, that our home fridges are echo chambers but for a six-pack of beer and a bottle of hot sauce. I notice I respond to this bit of rock ’n’ roll chef hype the same way I do when I read about that supposedly inviolable routine of accomplished and serious writers, the one in which the writer wakes up and writes for four hours and then goes for a walk to clear the mind and then after lunch reads in the afternoon and then goes to the pub for a few drinks before dinner and then retires by the fire before bed.

Which is: Oh, man. Must be nice!

But if you find yourself in the thick of, say, a brisk chef career, with maybe a professional writing gig on the side, as well as the not-negligible project of keeping a home, loaded up with the added considerations of some compelling children in the household whom you might like to see and know before they are gone, you probably have managed to keep a few vegetables in the drawer and a carton of eggs and a bin of cheeses and deli meats at least. I recommend adding a container of this anchovy-garlic dressing to your fridge too, at all times. It’s nothing, really — a jar of startlingly flavorful salad dressing essentially — but it does some improbable heavy lifting. And at mealtime, no matter how loosely defined, it can make you feel less like a barn animal at the trough and more like a civilized human at the table. Even if you are standing in front of the fridge with the door open rooting in the drawers at 2:30 in the morning.

It’s so inexplicable, but when the ingredients of this sauce — garlic, anchovies, chile flakes, lemon juice, extra-virgin olive oil — are drizzled or drenched or dotted accordingly, the taste can differ depending where and how it lands, kind of like a mood ring that passes through clear opal green to dark charcoal and smoky black. When you eat it straight, it can really punch you in the face. The intense burn of fresh garlic — and so shockingly much of it — and the tight sandpaper astringency of the lemon juice can make you think you’ve made a mistake and gotten the proportions wrong. But by the time you spoon it generously over cold steamed broccoli, or plain boiled cauliflower, it is tamed. And when it’s tossed with curly leafy mustard greens, it evolves in a different and distinct way — a little deeper, more warmly, less sharp.

I once dipped the left-behind crusts of the kids’ pizza into it and accidentally discovered that it should be mandatory as a drizzle over a standard white pie. I’ve whisked in a healthy dollop of thick plain yogurt and dressed cold boiled spinach and thought of it as a tasty Western version of spinach goma ae — the Asian cold dish with sesame paste. Poured over still-warm diced, boiled potatoes, then showered with celery leaves, it makes a lunch. And if you blend in some freshly grated, still-on-the-moist-side young Parmesan cheese along with a sieved hard-boiled egg and a ton of black pepper, you could legitimately pass it off as a Caesar salad, even if spooned over escarole on toast.

I know the lonely rattle of hot sauce and beer bottles makes our reputation a little more badass, and makes us look a little edgier, a little skinnier in our torn tight black jeans, a little more lone wolf. But I would argue that those same late hours and those same long shifts and that unrelenting work would make you even more formidable if you could pull off a little something civilized, and interesting to eat, whenever you finally get home.

Recipe: Anchovy-Garlic Dressing