Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sardines and Crab, Savoury Of
Sardines and Crab, Savoury Of
Bone six sardines, rub them through a small sieve; then add the flesh of a small crab, the hard-boiled yolk of an egg, a pinch of cayenne, a little cream, two ounces of bread-crumbs, an ounce of butter, and a raw egg. Mix thoroughly, then make into small balls, roll in beaten egg, then in bread-crumbs, and fry in boiling fat. Garnish with crisp parsley. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
A late-Victorian savoury: tinned sardines and crab bound into croquettes, crumbed and deep-fried. The mixture is soft, so the binding and chilling matter more than anything else in the method.
- Bind it firm, then chillThe binding here is light — two ounces of crumbs and one raw egg against a good deal of moist fish — so the mixture may be slack; chilling it before shaping will make the balls easier to roll. If it smears rather than rolls, more crumbs will help.
- "A little cream"Genuinely unspecified, and it should be. Add it a teaspoon at a time only if the paste is too stiff to come together; a tablespoon is usually the outside limit for this quantity.
- SardinesMost likely tinned sardines in oil, though the book does not say so. Drain them well, and lift out the backbone with the tip of a knife — the small pin bones are soft enough to go through the sieve. Six sardines is roughly one small tin.
- Crab"A small crab" yields perhaps 3–4 oz of picked meat. A mix of white and brown meat gives the better flavour; all-white makes a blander, drier ball.
- Rubbing through a sieveA food processor does the sardines in seconds, but pulse rather than run it.
- "Boiling fat"Deep fat, hot enough to brown the crumb quickly; by modern practice around 350–375F. Fry in small batches so the temperature holds, or the crumb coat soaks up oil.
- Crisp parsleyFried parsley, not raw. Dry the sprigs thoroughly and drop them into the same fat for a few seconds after the last batch — wet parsley spits violently in hot oil.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 walnut-sized balls, enough for four as a savoury course or six to eight as something handed round with drinks.
- The cost note1s. 3d. is the pre-decimal price for the whole dish as the book reckoned it, given for the housekeeper's benefit; it has no modern equivalent worth quoting.
This belongs to the savoury — the small, sharp, salty course served after the sweet at a Victorian dinner, intended to close the palate before the wine. Cassell's is full of them, and they lean heavily on anchovy, sardine, cheese and cayenne precisely because that hot-salt register was what the course was for. Tinned sardines made the dish possible on any evening: French canneries at Nantes had been packing them in oil since the 1820s and 1830s, with Portuguese canning following in the 1880s, and a tin was cheap enough that a preserved fish could be treated as an everyday store-cupboard item. Pairing it with fresh picked crab stretches a small crab a long way with something bought in a tin.