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Anchovy Olives
Boil an egg for ten minutes, then take the yolk and mix it thoroughly with a tea-spoonful of anchovy paste. Stone six or seven Spanish olives, and fill them with the mixture. Prepare two slices of buttered toast as for anchovies, but cut into small squares. Put an olive on each, make very hot, and serve.
A late-Victorian savoury, meant to come after the sweet course in a handful of hot mouthfuls. The whole thing takes ten minutes plus the egg.
- The hinge: heat briefly, not long"make very hot" here means warming through rather than baking, and in a Victorian kitchen would likely have meant a moment at the fire or under a salamander. A few minutes in a hot oven is enough to warm the filling and crisp the toast; longer dries the yolk paste to a crumb and toughens the olives.
- Spanish olivesLarge green brine-cured olives, probably of the queen or gordal type, sold pitted or unpitted. Buy them unpitted and stone them yourself if you can — the cavity stays tighter and holds the filling.
- Anchovy pasteModern tubed anchovy paste is a fair match; Gentleman's Relish is a period relative and considerably spicier. Both are very salty, as are the olives, so add nothing else.
- One yolk to a teaspoonA ten-minute egg gives a firm, dry yolk that mashes to a stiff paste. Sieve it rather than mash it if you want the mixture smooth enough to pipe. The white is not used here; keep it for a salad.
- "As for anchovies"The book assumes you already know its method for an anchovy savoury; here the toast is simply buttered and divided into small squares, roughly the footprint of an olive.
- YieldSix or seven pieces — one or two per person for four at most. Scale by the egg: one yolk and a teaspoon of paste fills about seven large olives.
This belongs to the English savoury course, the small hot salty dish served after the pudding and before dessert in late nineteenth-century dinners, and the reason Victorian and Edwardian cookery books carry pages of anchovy toasts, devilled roes, cheese ramekins and stuffed olives. Potted anchovy paste and Spanish green olives were both ordinary grocer's goods, which is why the recipe can assume both are simply on hand. It is less a dish than a formula — cooked yolk as a binder, a salty paste as the flavour, toast as the vehicle — and the same three-part logic underlies many of the savouries of the period.