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Sardine Fritters
Cut slices of roll or loaf bread into equal-sized shapes. They must be a good half-inch thick, and enough of them to form a ring round the edge of a small dish. Beat two or three eggs, and mix with them rather more than their measure of milk. Soak the bread slices in this, and fry them in butter to a delicate pale brown. Lay the slices round the edge of your dish, letting one slice rest on the edge of the other. Place poached eggs in the middle of the dish, and put on them the following sauce, which must be just thick enough to spread. Mince the yolks of four hard-boiled eggs quite small. Chop fine some parsley, a little sprig of tarragon, and some pimpernel or burnet. Melt a piece of butter in a stewpan; put in the minced herbs, and stir them a few minutes to soften; then add salt, pepper, and the minced eggs, with a dessert-spoonful of gravy, the same of lemon-juice or vinegar, a spoonful of capers whole, a little oil and mustard, and, if required, a few crumbs to thicken. Stir all together. Put a small tuft on each poached egg, and spread the rest on the wreath of sippets. Take about a dozen sardines, bone them, and mince them small with a piece of butter and a little cayenne pepper. Divide and spread this on the sippets. Place them to warm for a minute in the oven, and serve directly after the soup.
An egg dish dressed twice over: fried bread rounds under minced sardine, poached eggs under a green herb-and-yolk sauce. The title is misleading — nothing here is a fritter in the batter-and-deep-fat sense.
- Work in the right orderThe sauce and the sardine mince both keep, and the fried bread will sit for a while; the poached eggs will not. Make everything else first, poach the eggs last, assemble and warm briefly.
- SippetsThe word means small shaped pieces of fried or toasted bread, not a modern crouton. Cut them a full half-inch thick from a firm white loaf, slightly stale, so they take the egg-and-milk soak without collapsing.
- The soakTwo or three eggs beaten with rather more than their own volume of milk — for three eggs, about 3/4 cup milk. This is plain French toast custard; a brief dip is enough for stale bread, longer for fresh.
- Pimpernel or burnetIn older English kitchen usage 'pimpernel' was often another name for salad burnet, a cucumber-scented herb once common in kitchen gardens and now rare in shops, though the recipe offers the two names as alternatives. Chervil is an easy substitute; a little cucumber peel finely chopped also gets the note. Do not use scarlet pimpernel, an unrelated and unwanted plant.
- "A dessert-spoonful of gravy"A dessertspoon is about 2 teaspoons. "Gravy" here means concentrated meat stock or the juices from a roast, used as seasoning rather than liquid — a spoonful of reduced beef or veal stock does the job. The later "spoonful of capers" and "a little oil and mustard" are genuinely unmeasured; start with a teaspoon of oil and half a teaspoon of mustard and taste.
- SardinesTinned sardines in oil, drained, are the easiest option and probably what is meant. A dozen small ones is roughly two standard tins. Lift out the backbones and mash with soft butter (the recipe says only 'a piece') and cayenne to a spreadable paste.
- The warming ovenThe recipe gives no temperature: a minute or two in a low oven, only enough to take the chill off the sardine butter. Longer and the poached yolks set and the fried bread dries out.
- Yield and place at tableThe recipe does not say how many poached eggs are wanted; a dozen sardines and four hard-boiled yolks would dress perhaps four to six on one small dish, a shared dish rather than individual portions. 'Serve directly after the soup' places it early in the Victorian dinner sequence, not as a main dish.
Cassell's belongs to the era when tinned sardines had just become a cheap, reliable pantry staple in Britain: the Nantes canneries were shipping oil-packed sardines in quantity from the mid-nineteenth century, and English cookery books responded with a run of sardine toasts, pastes, salads and savouries. This one grafts that new ingredient onto a much older framework \— poached eggs on fried sippets under a chopped herb-and-yolk sauce, close in spirit to a sauce ravigote or a green sauce of the kind French cookery had used with eggs and cold meats for generations. The call for pimpernel or burnet dates the dish as much as the sardines do: salad burnet was a standard kitchen-garden herb in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and had largely dropped out of British cooking by the twentieth. The instruction to serve it straight after the soup places it in the long formal dinner sequence, where a small hot egg entrée bridged the gap between soup or fish and the heavier roasts.