Stone some large olives and fill the space with anchovy paste, mixed with well-seasoned tomato-sauce. Then fry thin slices of bread and spread with some of the paste. Place a filled olive in the centre; sprinkle with chopped hard-boiled eggs and garnish with fillets of anchovies and sprigs of parsley.
A canapé rather than a relish in the modern sense: stuffed olives on fried bread. Everything can be assembled ahead except the frying.
- "Stone" the olivesThis means pit them. Large green olives — Queen or Gordal types — are what you want, whole and firm rather than the small pitted supermarket kind, which collapse when filled. A cherry pitter or a small knife tip works.
- Anchovy pasteTubes of anchovy paste are still sold and are the right thing here. If you only have salted or oil-packed fillets, mash a few to a paste with the flat of a knife; reserve some whole for the garnish, as the recipe calls for both.
- "Well-seasoned tomato-sauce"At the time this meant a cooked, reduced, seasoned sauce, not ketchup and not a jar of pasta sauce. A few spoonfuls of thick passata cooked down with salt and pepper is closest. Keep it stiff — a loose sauce will soak the bread.
- ProportionsNone are given. Start with roughly two parts anchovy paste to one part tomato sauce, taste, and stop adding salt: anchovy carries plenty. The mixture should hold its shape on a spoon.
- Frying the breadCut rounds slightly wider than an olive from firm white bread, and fry in butter or olive oil until crisp and dry on both sides. Drain on paper. Soft or underfried bread turns limp within minutes of being spread.
- Assembly orderSpread, then centre the olive, then scatter the chopped egg, then lay the anchovy fillets and parsley. Doing the egg last leaves it sitting loose on top rather than gripping the paste.
- Yield and servingFigure two or three per person as an appetiser; a dozen rounds uses about a dozen olives and two tablespoons of paste. Serve within an hour of assembling, at cool room temperature, with sherry or a dry white.
This is a book of one dish a day drawn from around the world, and the entries labelled by nationality often reflect what a compiler understood a country's flavours to be rather than any dish cooked there under that name. The vocabulary here — olives, anchovy, tomato, hard-boiled egg, fried bread — is genuinely Spanish in outline, though the compilation gives no source and heads the dish only "No. 4 Spanish". "Relish" in cookbooks of this period covered a broad category of sharp, salty little things served to sharpen the appetite before a meal or to fill out a supper tray, which is why a canapé sits under that heading. Anchovy paste in particular was a fixture of the late-Victorian and Edwardian larder, sold in tubes and pots and pressed into service for savouries, sandwiches and the toast course that closed a formal dinner.