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Egg and Anchovy Sandwiches
3 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 10 anchovies 3 hard-cooked eggs 2 tablespoonfuls grated cheese 1 teaspoonful curry powder 1/2 teaspoonful lemon juice Salt to taste Brown bread Watercress Bone anchovies, put them in basin or mortar with eggs, cheese, and one tablespoonful Crisco, and pound all well together. Mix remaining Crisco with curry powder, lemon juice, and salt to taste. Cut some thin brown bread, spread with curry mixture and layer of anchovy paste. Lay another piece of bread on top, and cut into fancy shapes. Arrange on a lace paper and garnish with watercress.
Sufficient for fifteen sandwiches.
A sandwich filling from a Crisco promotional cookbook, which explains why shortening appears where any other book of the period would have said butter. The method is sound; the fat is the part worth reconsidering.
- Substitute butter for the CriscoMelted shortening sets up waxy and flavourless on cold bread, and there are only three tablespoons of it doing the work of both binder and spread. Softened butter in the same quantity gives a better mouthfeel and carries the curry and lemon properly.
- Anchovies'Ten anchovies' most likely means ten whole salt-cured fish, which the cook was expected to rinse and bone, as the instruction to 'Bone anchovies' implies. About twenty oil-packed fillets — nearer two standard small tins than one — is the rough equivalent; drain them and skip the boning step.
- Salt last, and taste firstAnchovies and grated cheese both bring plenty of salt. Mix the paste, taste it, and only then decide whether the "salt to taste" in the curry butter is needed at all — usually it is not.
- Grated cheeseIn 1915 this would have been a dry, hard cheese for grating: Parmesan or a well-aged Cheddar. Anything soft or young will slacken the paste.
- Basin or mortarA mortar and pestle gives the smoothest result, but a food processor does it in seconds. Stop short of a purée — the paste should still show flecks of egg white.
- Brown breadA close-grained wholemeal sandwich loaf, not a soft modern wholewheat. Cut thin, and firm day-old bread will survive being stamped into shapes far better than fresh.
- Yield and holdingFifteen small sandwiches, meaning tea-sized shapes rather than halves. Assemble no more than an hour or two ahead, cover with a damp cloth, and refrigerate; egg-and-fish fillings should not sit out at room temperature through a long afternoon.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company had launched in 1911; the recipes are built around the product, which is why a delicate tea sandwich here is bound with melted shortening rather than butter. The sandwich itself belongs to the Edwardian and early American tea table, where anchovy paste was a common savoury.