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Sardine Mustard
Take half a dozen sardines, remove the bones carefully, and pound the flesh with the yolks of four hard-boiled eggs. Mix a shallot, finely minced, with the paste. Add also two table-spoonfuls of mustard mixed with vinegar, or any sort of made mustard, two table-spoonfuls of vinegar, and the same of salad oil, together with salt and cayenne pepper to taste. Work all together till quite smooth.
A pounded fish-and-egg condiment in the old style, closer to a sharp sandwich paste than to anything you would spoon beside a roast. It comes together in a food processor in under five minutes.
- Which sardinesSix sardines means six whole fish, not six tins. If you are using tinned fish in oil, allow a tin and a half of the standard small size, drained. Skin-on and bone-in tins are fine; the fine bones mash away to nothing, and the recipe tells you to lift out the backbone.
- "Made mustard"Made mustard is prepared mustard from a jar, as opposed to dry mustard powder; the recipe accepts "any sort". A plain English or Dijon suits it; American yellow mustard will make it sweeter and blander.
- A shallot, not an onionUse one modern shallot lobe, minced very fine, and let the finished paste sit half an hour so the raw bite softens into the mixture.
- Pound, or pulsePounding brings the yolks, oil and fish together into a smooth spreadable paste rather than a mash. A small food processor does it well, but stop before it turns gluey.
- The vinegar and oil are a balanceTwo tablespoons each of vinegar and salad oil is a lot of liquid for six small fish, and it will loosen the paste considerably. Add the vinegar last and by the spoonful, tasting as you go, since tinned sardines vary in salt and oil content.
- Salad oilIn this period salad oil generally meant olive oil. A light olive oil or a neutral oil both work; a peppery extra-virgin will fight the mustard.
- Yield and useMakes about a cup. Serve on toast fingers or thin brown bread as a savoury, or with cold beef and boiled potatoes. Keeps three days covered in the refrigerator, though the shallot grows more assertive.
Sardine pastes and "mustards" belong to the late-Victorian savoury, the small sharp course served after the sweet at an English dinner and generally said to have been little known outside Britain. Tinned sardines, often traced to Nantes and later to Portugal and Norway, were among the first widely available preserved foods to reach middle-class British larders in quantity, and cookery books of the 1870s onwards are thick with ways to use them: sardine toast, sardine butter, sardines on croutes. The dish demonstrates a technique as much as it makes a dish: the binding of oil and vinegar into hard-boiled yolk, the same emulsion that underpins mayonnaise and the classic salad dressing of the period.