Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sardine Toast
Sardine Toast
Bone eight smoked sardines, then pound them in a mortar with two ounces of fresh butter, a sprinkling of cayenne pepper, and four peppercorns. Put into a small pan and heat thoroughly. Lay the mixture on rounds or squares of hot buttered toast, squeeze a little lemon over, and serve.
A savoury of the sort served at the end of a Victorian dinner or as a light supper dish. It comes together in about ten minutes and depends almost entirely on the quality of the fish.
- Smoked sardinesTinned smoked sardines (sometimes sold as smoked sprats or brisling) are the closest match; ordinary sardines in oil will work but give a milder, oilier result. Drain them well before pounding or the paste will be loose.
- BoningSplit each fish along the belly and lift out the backbone with the tip of a knife; the tail and small rib bones can stay, as they are soft enough to disappear in the pounding.
- Those four peppercornsWhole peppercorns pounded into two ounces of butter will not break down completely and leave hard grit in the paste. Crush them in the mortar first, or substitute a scant quarter teaspoon of coarsely ground black pepper.
- QuantitiesTwo ounces of butter is half a stick, 55 g. Eight small sardines with that much butter makes enough for roughly six to eight rounds of toast, serving three or four as a savoury.
- Heating the mixture"Heat thoroughly" means warm through only, over low heat, stirring. Let it boil and the butter separates out and the paste turns greasy.
- A food processor worksA small processor or a fork and a bowl will do the pounding, but the mortar gives a smoother, more emulsified paste because the butter is worked into the fish rather than chopped with it.
- ToastCut the rounds or squares from firm white bread, toast it, butter it and top it at once. Made in advance the toast softens under the warm paste.
- Seasoning at the endSardines and butter are both salty enough that no salt is called for; the lemon is not optional, as it is the only thing cutting the fat.
Sardine toast belongs to the savoury course, the small hot salt dish that closed a formal English dinner after the sweets and before the dessert of fruit and nuts. Anchovy, sardine, cheese and roe on toast filled that slot, a pattern generally associated with the later nineteenth century, and Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery carries a number of variations on it. Tinned sardines were among the earliest canned goods to become genuinely cheap and widespread in Britain, arriving in quantity from the French Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts from the mid-1800s, and cookery writers seized on them for exactly this kind of quick dish. The habit of pounding a preserved fish with butter to make a potted paste is much older than the tin, and survives in commercial forms such as sardine and anchovy pastes sold in jars; making it fresh gives a far cleaner flavour than any of them.