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Anchovies on Toast
Make two or three slices of very crisp toast of moderate thickness. Butter while hot, and cut into six or eight fingers, which should all be of equal size. Lay an anchovy on each, sprinkle with pepper, and put them in the oven to become very hot, but take care not to let them become hard and dry. Serve quickly. If a gas-cooker is used they can be placed under the toaster for two or three minutes, instead of in the oven. Probable cost, one penny each.
A savoury of the plainest kind, and it stands or falls on the toast. Everything here is about heat and speed rather than technique.
- The hinge: brief heat onlyThe toast goes into the oven to warm through and melt the butter into the anchovy, not to cook. The recipe's "two or three minutes" is given for the gas toaster, but the oven time should be short too: past that the fingers turn to brittle rusks and the anchovy goes leathery.
- "Under the toaster"The gas cooker's toaster was most likely the overhead grilling element, what an American kitchen calls the broiler. Two to three minutes under it, watched, is what the recipe allows; no oven temperature is given in the original.
- The anchovies themselvesCassell's cook was likely buying salted anchovies whole from a cask or jar, which need boning and a rinse or short soak before use. Modern tinned fillets in oil are already filleted and much milder; drain them and pat dry so the toast does not go greasy.
- One fillet per fingerOne anchovy per finger -- The recipe lays a whole anchovy on each finger, which split gives two fillets. With modern tinned fillets a tin of eight to twelve will cover six or eight fingers at a fillet apiece, or half that number if you follow the original literally. Lay them lengthwise so each bite gets some.
- Pepper, and nothing elseNo salt: the fish carries all of it. Cayenne turns up often in Victorian savouries and some cooks would have used it here, though this recipe says only "pepper".
- Toast thickness"Moderate thickness" is not defined; somewhere around a third to half an inch of firm white loaf suits the purpose. Anything thin collapses under the butter; anything thick fails to crisp through.
- YieldTwo or three slices give six to eight fingers, enough for three or four people as a savoury or with drinks. Serve them straight from the heat on a warmed plate.
Anchovy toast belongs to the savoury, the small salty course served after the sweet at Victorian and Edwardian dinners, largely a British habit and one that puzzled Continental visitors. Anchovies were among the few strongly flavoured preserved fish reliably available inland, sold salted in barrels and worked into essences, pastes and sauces; the commercial anchovy paste sold as Gentleman's Relish is generally traced to the late 1820s and made the same flavour available without the boning. The "probable cost, one penny each" is characteristic of Cassell's, which costed nearly every dish so that a household could budget, and the aside about the gas cooker marks the period when gas ranges with overhead grills were spreading, though coal ranges remained dominant in most kitchens.