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Sardine Butter
This preparation is very good spread on toast or made into sandwiches. Take twelve sardines and wash them quickly in cold water. Scrape off the skin, remove the bones, and pound the flesh in a marble mortar with a piece of fresh butter, and add butter gradually till the quantity mixed in equals half a pound. Add salt and cayenne pepper to taste, and work the preparation into a smooth paste. If sardines preserved in oil--such as are imported in small bottles and boxes--are used, do not wash the fish: do nothing but scrape off the skin and remove the bones. Press the paste into a jar or into small potting-pans, and store for use. Anchovies may be prepared in the same way as sardines. If liked, a little ground mace may be added with the cayenne pepper.
A Victorian potted savoury that survives almost unchanged as a modern fish butter. The only real decisions are how finely to work it and how long to keep it.
- The proportionsTwelve sardines to half a pound (225 g) of butter — the flesh of perhaps two or three standard 120 g tins. That is a butter-heavy ratio; a lighter, more strongly flavoured spread comes from using the same twelve fish with 4 oz (115 g) of butter.
- Butter temperature is the hingeThe butter must be soft enough to take the fish but not oily or beginning to melt, or the paste will split and weep when it chills. Leave it out an hour, and add it in three or four additions rather than all at once.
- Mortar or processorA food processor does the job in seconds, but it whips air in and can turn the paste pale and mousse-like. Short pulses, or a fork and a bowl, give the dense texture the original intends.
- Washing the fishThe instruction to wash points to fish sold loose in brine or salt rather than to oil-packed tins. Oil-packed tinned sardines are better simply drained — the recipe itself says not to wash them; washing strips flavour and waterlogs the flesh.
- Skin and bonesModern tinned sardines have soft, edible bones and thin skin, so the scraping and boning is optional. Removing the central spine still gives a smoother paste; the small rib bones will pound away to nothing.
- Salt with anchoviesThe anchovy version will rarely need any added salt. Salt-packed anchovies should be rinsed and soaked briefly first; oil-packed fillets go straight in.
- StorageThis is a refrigerator preparation, not a shelf-stable one. Press into a jar, cover the surface closely, chill, and use within about five days — the old practice of sealing potted meats under clarified butter for weeks in a cool larder does not translate to a modern kitchen.
- Yield and servingAbout 400 g of paste, enough for roughly twenty rounds of toast or a large plate of sandwiches. Take it out of the refrigerator twenty minutes before serving so it spreads without tearing the bread.
Potting — pounding cooked flesh with butter and spice, then sealing it in a jar — was the standard English method of preserving fish and meat long before tinning, and it outlived its usefulness as a preservative to survive purely as a flavour. Sardine butter belongs to the later, easier phase of that tradition: cheap tinned sardines from Brittany, part of a French Atlantic trade already established by mid-century, arrived in British shops in quantity through the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the time Cassell's was compiled the little boxes and bottles were common enough for the recipe to assume the reader owns some. The result found its natural home in the Victorian and Edwardian savoury course, the small salty dish served after the sweet, and in the sandwich fillings of afternoon tea. The interchangeability with anchovy is telling: both were valued less as fish than as a way of getting a concentrated salt-and-umami hit into butter, which is exactly what anchovy butter is still used for today.