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Sardines, Canapees Of
Take some slices of bread, and cut them neatly into oval or octagon shapes. Toast them slightly, or fry them in oil or butter till they are of a nice yellow colour. Take some sardines, and strip them from the bones. Lay one-half of them aside, and pound the other to a smooth paste with the yolks of three or four hard-boiled eggs and some butter. Add mustard, pepper, chives, minced parsley, tarragon, and a little vinegar. When these ingredients are thoroughly incorporated, spread the paste over the prepared slice of roll. On the top lay the other half of the sardines, cut into small strips; and place on each croquette little slices of pickled gherkins, and here and there a shelled prawn.
A Victorian savoury built from tinned sardines and hard-boiled egg yolk, meant to close a dinner rather than open it. The recipe gives no quantities beyond the eggs, so treat the paste as a matter of taste and texture.
- The hinge: keep the paste stiffThe mixture has to hold its shape on toast without weeping oil into it. Drain the sardines well, add the vinegar a few drops at a time, and stop while the paste is still firm enough to stand in a peak on the spoon.
- Working proportionsTwo tins of sardines (about 90-120g each) to three hard-boiled yolks and roughly 50g softened butter makes enough for eight to ten small canapés. Half the fish goes into the paste, half is reserved for the strips on top.
- "Canapees" and "croquette"The recipe uses both words for the same thing, which is simply a shaped piece of fried or toasted bread with a topping. Nothing here is a croquette in the modern sense of a crumbed and deep-fried roll.
- Slices of bread, slices of rollThe opening says bread and the later line says roll; either works. A close-crumbed white loaf cut about 1cm thick holds up best, and stale bread fries far crisper than fresh.
- MustardIn an English book of this period this most likely means dry mustard powder mixed to a paste rather than a jarred French mustard, though both were available. A quarter-teaspoon of powder is plenty against three yolks; it should sharpen the fish, not announce itself.
- Sardines and their bonesTinned sardine bones are soft enough to eat and are a useful source of calcium, so stripping them is a matter of texture, not necessity. Lifting the backbone out with the point of a knife takes seconds per fish.
- Prawns"shelled prawn" here likely means a small cooked cold-water prawn rather than a large tiger prawn. The recipe says "here and there a shelled prawn", so it is a scattered garnish rather than one guaranteed on every canapé.
- ServingAssemble within an hour of eating or the toast softens. Serve cool but not refrigerator-cold, as chilled butter dulls the tarragon and chives.
Savouries of this kind were a fixture of the late-Victorian and Edwardian dinner, served after the sweet course and before dessert, and were understood as a small salty mouthful to finish the wine on. Their rise depended on the tinned sardine, which arrived from Nantes and the Breton and Vendée coasts in quantity through the middle of the nineteenth century and became one of the first preserved foods a middle-class English kitchen could keep in the cupboard. Cassell's, aimed squarely at that household, treats the tin as unremarkable and spends its attention instead on the trimmings: chives, tarragon, gherkins, a prawn set here and there. The word canapé is French for a sofa or couch, and the culinary sense is traditionally explained as the bread being the seat on which the garnish reclines.