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Anchovy Powder
Pound some anchovies in a mortar. Rub them through a hair sieve, and make them into a paste with dried and sifted flour. Roll them into cakes, then toast them before the fire, and rub them to powder. If the flavour is liked, grated lemon-rind and cayenne may be added after the cakes are baked. Put the powder in a bottle, cork it closely, and it will keep for years. It is useful for flavouring purposes, and makes a nice relish when sprinkled over sandwiches or toast. Time to prepare, about an hour. Probable cost, 1s. for a half-pint bottle. A dessert-spoonful of powder will flavour half a pint of sauce.
This is a store-cupboard flavouring rather than a dish, and it belongs to a period before refrigeration when a fish preparation kept dry in a corked bottle was considered stable indefinitely. The method does not translate, and the notes below explain the units as well as the problems.
- Why it fails: no drying standardAnchovies pounded with flour and toasted "before the fire" reach no measured temperature and no measured moisture level. A fish-and-starch paste that is nearly but not quite dry is an excellent medium for moulds and their toxins, and a corked bottle kept for years gives them the whole time in the world.
- Why it fails: histamineAnchovies are among the fish most prone to histamine (scombrotoxin) formation, which develops whenever the flesh is held warm and is not destroyed by toasting, baking or any later cooking. Repeated pounding, sieving and slow toasting at hearth temperatures is precisely the handling that builds it up, and a concentrated powder concentrates it too.
- Why it fails: the salt is unmeasuredWhatever preservation the original relied on came from the salt already in the barrelled anchovies, diluted by an unstated quantity of flour. There is no way to know the final salt concentration, so there is no way to know whether it is preserving anything.
- What to use insteadCommercial anchovy paste, anchovy essence, or a tin of salted anchovies mashed into a sauce gives the same savoury depth with none of the storage problem. If you want a dried fish seasoning, follow a current recipe with specified temperatures and holding times.
- Reading the measurementsHalf a pint is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or about 1¼ US cups. A dessert-spoonful sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, roughly two teaspoons, so the original is proposing about two teaspoons of powder to a generous cup of sauce.
- Vessels and equipmentA hair sieve is a fine-mesh sieve of woven horsehair, used here to strain out bones and skin; a fine nylon or steel sieve does the same job. "Toast them before the fire" means set before an open hearth, an uncontrolled radiant heat with no equivalent setting on a modern oven dial.
Anchovies were among the Victorian kitchen's chief sources of concentrated savouriness, competing with mushroom ketchup, essences and bottled sauces for the same job, and were an ingredient a cook reached for when a sauce, a gravy or a devilled dish needed depth that meat stock alone would not give, and Cassell's carries a long run of them: anchovy butter, anchovy essence, anchovy paste, anchovy sauce, anchovy toast. The taste for it descends from the salted-fish condiments of the Mediterranean, and is often compared to Roman garum, though the direct British line runs through the eighteenth-century fashion for bottled fish sauces, of which Worcestershire sauce and the potted anchovy relishes sold under names like Gentleman's Relish are the surviving commercial descendants. Reducing the fish to a dry powder was a straightforward piece of household economy: it made a perishable, bulky, barrel-packed ingredient into something a cook believed she could keep on a shelf and measure by the spoonful, and the confident promise that "it will keep for years" tells you how much faith the period placed in drying and a tight cork.