Pin Toast

A strip of thin toast with chicken-liver butter and a single cured anchovy laid on the bias — one piece, passed once, cut on the same diagonal line as the cabbage at the table.

September 4, 2026 By Rachel Anderson

Kitchen Kit

Pin Toast

Pairing
Wine — A chilled dry Amontillado — nutty and saline, it meets the anchovy head-on and stops the liver butter from coating your palate before the meal has started. Mixed drink — A Bamboo — dry sherry and dry vermouth, a dash of each bitters, stirred cold and served up: light enough to hand round at the door, dry and savory enough to survive a mouthful of anchovy. Teetotaler — Cold-brewed roasted barley tea over a lot of ice with a wide strip of lemon peel twisted over the glass — toasty, faintly bitter, entirely unsweet, and it does for liver what a dry sherry does.

Tools
A food processor (a stick blender leaves it grainy and the whole appeal here is silk), a fine sieve and a flexible spatula to push the pâté through it, a wide sauté pan, a digital scale, a long serrated knife for cutting crisp toast into strips without shattering it, fridge space for the butter to firm up for an hour, and one large flat tray you can carry through a room in a single pass

Ingredients · swaps in parentheses
Chicken livers (a good bought chicken liver pâté loosened with melted butter works, but bought pâté runs sweeter and more heavily seasoned, so taste before you add salt), unsalted butter, a small shallot, kosher salt, black pepper, brandy or dry sherry (optional, and the dish is fine without it), thin-sliced white sandwich bread (sourdough looks better and cuts worse — the open crumb tears under a serrated knife), canned cured anchovy fillets in oil (slivers of cured lemon peel instead if anchovy is out, though you keep the diagonal and lose the salt)

Magic
Don't pour the anchovy oil down the sink. Drain both cans into a small bowl, grate in the zest of a lemon, and brush that over the toast strips while they are still hot — hot toast drinks it in, cold toast just sits in it and goes greasy. You get anchovy underneath the liver butter as well as on top of it, so every bite reads savory from the first second rather than only at the end, and the zest cuts the sweetness liver always carries. If that is one step too many, a scrape of lemon zest over the assembled tray does a quieter version of the same job.

Before you begin
Liver is the whole risk and the window is about a minute wide: pull it while the center is still properly pink, because once it grays through it goes grainy and chalky and no amount of butter, blending or sieving brings it back. Let the toast cool completely before the butter goes near it, or the butter melts into the crumb and you lose the crisp base you toasted for. Count anchovies out one per strip as you assemble rather than trusting the cans to be generous — a can that looks full comes up short across forty pieces. Once assembled you have twenty minutes before the base softens, so build late, pass once, and don't leave the tray standing.

One piece, passed once, and gone in a bite and a half: a strip of very thin toasted bread with a smear of chicken-liver and butter and a single cured anchovy laid diagonally across it, on the bias, the same line the cabbage takes at the table. It’s the arrival food for a dinner dressed as a couture fitting, and it looks the part — a single clean strip, one considered stroke of anchovy, nothing fussy layered on top of it.

Yield and time

Yield: 40 pieces, written for a room of 40; multiplies directly
Active time: 30 minutes
Total time: 45 minutes
Make-ahead window: Liver butter: up to 2 days ahead. Toast and assembly: same day, close to service.

Ingredients

Chicken livers, trimmed — 9 oz
Unsalted butter, divided — 10 tablespoons
Shallot, finely chopped — 1 small
Kosher salt (Diamond Crystal) — 2 teaspoons, plus more to taste
Black pepper, to taste
A splash of brandy or sherry, if on hand — 1 tablespoon
Thin-sliced white sandwich bread, crusts removed — 10 slices
Cured anchovy fillets in oil — 40 fillets (about 2 tins)

Method

Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter in a pan over medium heat, add the shallot, and cook for 3–4 minutes, until soft and translucent.
Add the chicken livers and cook for 4–5 minutes, turning once, until browned outside but still pink at the very center — overcooked liver turns grainy and chalky, and this is the mistake to actively watch for.
Add the brandy or sherry if using, let it bubble for 30 seconds, then transfer everything to a food processor with the remaining butter and the salt, and blend until completely smooth.
Push the mixture through a fine sieve for the silkiest possible texture, season with black pepper and more salt to taste, and chill until firm enough to spread, at least 1 hour.
Toast the bread slices until deeply golden and crisp all the way through, then cut each slice into 4 long, narrow strips, on the diagonal — this is the bias cut the whole dish, and the theme, is named for.
Spread each strip thinly with the chilled liver butter and lay one anchovy fillet diagonally across it, echoing the cut of the toast itself.
Serve within 20 minutes of assembling, passed once on a single tray rather than left out to be picked over.

Make-ahead

The liver butter can be made up to 2 days ahead and keeps well, tightly covered, in the fridge — in fact it firms up and slices more cleanly on day two. Toast the bread and assemble close to service; assembled toasts sitting more than 20 minutes go soft under the butter and lose their crisp base.

Holding and service

Twenty minutes on a tray before the toast starts to soften and the whole point of the crisp base is lost. This is a passed, one-time item, not a grazing station — make it, pass it once, and move on.

Scaling

The liver butter scales cleanly in one batch; toasting and cutting the bread is the bottleneck, since a toaster or grill only fits so many slices at once — past about sixty pieces, toast in relays starting well before the tray needs to go out, not all at the last minute. The anchovy count doesn’t scale as a rough estimate either; count out exactly one fillet per strip while you’re assembling, since a tin that looks generous can come up noticeably short once you’re placing one fillet per piece across forty of them.

Substitutions

No chicken livers, or a guest won’t eat them — a good bought chicken liver pâté, thinned slightly with a touch of melted butter to make it spreadable, gets most of the way there without the from-scratch step.
Anchovy not wanted — a very thin sliver of cured lemon peel, laid the same diagonal way, keeps the visual bias-cut idea and adds a bright, salty-adjacent note without the fish.

Why this dish, at Nothing in This Room Is Finished

It belongs to Nothing in This Room Is Finished, where nothing is allowed to look finished. This toast is cut on the bias — the exact forty-five-degree line the cabbage at the table is cut on — because a couture fitting repeats its own logic in everything it touches.

Part of Recipes & Technique.