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Fish Sandwiches
Cut bread and butter as for other sandwiches, place thin scallops of any fish on the slices, and instead of mustard, use Tartar sauce. Put a layer of finely-sliced lettuce on the top of the sauce, and cover with bread and butter. Serve cut into squares. Thin slices of hard-boiled eggs may be added, but fish alone, if well seasoned, makes good sandwiches.
A late-Victorian use for leftover cooked fish, and the instructions assume more kitchen context than they state. A few clarifications make it workable.
- "Scallops" of fishHere the word means thin, flat slices cut across the grain of a cooked fillet, not the shellfish. Cold poached or baked salmon, halibut, cod, haddock or trout all work; flaking rather than slicing is acceptable with softer fish.
- The fish must already be cookedNothing in the recipe cooks anything, so it depends entirely on cold cooked fish from a previous meal. Use fish that has been properly cooked and refrigerated, and keep the assembled sandwiches cold until served.
- Seasoning is the hingeThe final line carries the whole recipe: cold fish is bland and needs salt, pepper and an acid. Squeeze lemon over the slices and season them before they go on the bread, not after.
- Tartar sauceIn this period it was generally a thick, mayonnaise-type sauce with capers, gherkins, shallot and parsley (some versions built on pounded hard-boiled yolks rather than raw), closer to a bound salad dressing than the loose bottled version. A stiff sauce is what keeps the bread from going wet.
- Bread and butterButter both slices right to the edges. The butter acts as a barrier as much as a flavouring, and that matters more with a wet filling like this.
- Lettuce"Finely-sliced" means shredded into ribbons, which sits flat and cuts cleanly. Dry it well; wet leaves defeat the butter.
- Serving and yieldThe recipe says only to cut the sandwiches into squares; it gives no quantities and does not mention trimming crusts. As a working estimate, four slices of bread and roughly 6 oz of cooked fish would give about sixteen small squares.
This sits among general sandwich instructions rather than in a fish chapter, which suggests it was thought of as a use for the remains of a boiled or baked fish — a standing preoccupation of Victorian household cookery, where a large fish was rarely eaten at one sitting. The sandwich had become a fixture of the English table over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it suited picnic hampers, railway journeys and afternoon tea, all occasions that wanted cold food cut small. The pairing of fish with tartar sauce was conventional by this date, the sauce having reached English kitchens from French cookery, where sauce tartare was a mayonnaise sharpened with capers and pickles; the instruction to use it "instead of mustard" implies mustard was the expected spread in the sandwiches the reader already knew.