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Pilchards, Curried
Take a tin of pilchards; rub a clean frying-pan with a clove of garlic, and turn the oil from the tin into it. Place it over a clear fire. Mix a table-spoonful of flour with a tea-spoonful of cornflour; moisten it with a very little water, and stir it into the oil until it has the consistency of a smooth thick gravy. Place the pilchards in this and warm them gently through, turning them carefully, and basting them several times during the cooking. When thoroughly hot, place them on a dish with the sauce, and put them in the oven for a few minutes. Serve with boiled rice on a separate dish.
A late-Victorian storecupboard supper built on a tin of fish, with the tin's own oil doing the work of butter. It is quick, but the method as written leaves two things unsaid: the curry, and the liquid.
- The missing curryNo curry powder appears anywhere in the text, yet the dish is called curried. Whether this is an oversight or an assumption that the cook would reach for the household jar unprompted, the recipe cannot work as titled without it: work about a teaspoon into the flour before it goes into the oil, and add more to taste once the sauce has come together.
- Not enough oilA modern tin of pilchards or sardines carries perhaps two tablespoons of oil, which is about what a tablespoon of flour plus a teaspoon of cornflour will take up; drained tins vary a good deal, so if yours yields much less, make up the difference with oil or butter to keep the fat and flour roughly equal in volume.
- The sauce needs more than "a very little water"Mixing the flours to a paste and stirring them into hot oil gives a stiff mass, not a gravy. Cook the paste in the fat for a minute, then let it down with about half a cup of water, fish stock or milk, added gradually, until it coats a spoon.
- Pilchards todayPilchard is the adult of the same fish sold young as a sardine. Tins labelled pilchards are now usually packed in tomato sauce, which will change the dish entirely; buy sardines in olive oil instead, two tins of about 120 g each for two people.
- The garlic rubRubbing a cut clove round the pan leaves only the faintest trace of garlic, which is all the recipe asks for. If you want the flavour to register, chop the clove and soften it in the oil before the flour goes in.
- Heat"A clear fire" means a settled bed of coals burnt through and burning without smoke or flame. A medium burner is a serviceable equivalent here. The fish are only being warmed through; canned pilchards are already cooked and will collapse into shreds if stirred or boiled.
- The oven finishThe recipe gives no oven heat at all, only "a few minutes". Around 350F for five minutes is enough to settle the dish and take the chill off the serving plate. Longer will dry the sauce to a skin.
- ServingOne tin serves one generously or two modestly. Plain boiled long-grain rice in a separate dish is as the original intends; a wedge of lemon is worth adding.
The pilchard was for centuries a Cornish industry rather than a Cornish delicacy: vast summer shoals were seined off the south-west coast, salted and pressed into casks, and shipped overwhelmingly to Italy and Spain, where the Catholic fasting calendar guaranteed a market. Canning small oily fish in oil, developed in France in the first half of the nineteenth century and common in Britain by the later part of it, turned that export fish into a cheap and permanently available British larder item, and cookery dictionaries like Cassell's carried a run of short recipes for making tinned fish presentable at table. Dressing it as a curry was an obvious move: curry powder had long since become a standing household jar rather than an exotic purchase, and curried fish, curried eggs and curried remains of yesterday's joint were a conventional English way of giving humble or leftover protein an identity. The recipe's silence about the powder itself suggests how thoroughly the habit had settled in.