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Sardines, Spinach With
Boil the spinach. Before doing this let it lie in water for a little while, and rinse it several times in fresh water. Put it into boiling water with a minced onion and plenty of salt, and let it boil gently, uncovered, for eight or ten minutes. Drain and chop the spinach. Take a few sardines, remove the skin and bones, then mince the fish, and stir with the vegetables. Take a good-sized piece of butter, and melt it in a stewpan, dredge in as much flour as it will absorb, and add a little water or broth, together with salt and pepper. Stir to a thick sauce, then stir the spinach in. Send to table when quite hot, garnishing the dish with hard-boiled eggs sliced.
A late-Victorian way of turning a tin of sardines and a bunch of spinach into a hot supper dish. The method is sound; only the quantities and a couple of the timings need attention.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. For four people as a light dish, reckon on about 2 lb of fresh spinach (or two 10 oz bags of ready-picked leaf, which loses less in trimming), one small onion, one tin of sardines (about 4 oz drained), 2 oz butter and about 2 oz flour, with roughly half a cup of water or stock.
- Boiling timeEight to ten minutes is longer than modern leaf needs; the recipe's insistence on soaking and repeated rinsing suggests spinach that came in dirtier than ours. Modern bagged leaf collapses in about two minutes; boil it longer and you lose both colour and flavour. Cook it just until it wilts, then drain hard.
- Drain it properlyThis is the hinge. Spinach holds an astonishing amount of water, and any left in will thin the sauce to nothing. Press it in a sieve or wring it in a clean cloth before chopping.
- Dredge in as much flour as it will absorbThat is a roux: equal weights of butter and flour, near enough. Cook it a minute before adding liquid so the sauce does not taste of raw flour.
- StewpanA heavy saucepan. Nothing specialised is meant.
- The sardinesTinned sardines in oil are the easiest reading, though the recipe only says 'a few sardines' and tells you to skin and bone them. With modern tins the backbone is usually soft enough to mash in rather than pick out. Add the fish off the heat or at the very end, since stirring it about while hot breaks it into paste.
- SeasoningSardines and their oil are already salty. Salt the sauce only after the fish has gone in.
- ServingSend it to table hot, with the sliced hard-boiled egg over the top; hot buttered toast underneath is a reasonable modern addition, though the recipe does not call for it. It will not sit well; the sauce stiffens as it cools.
Cassell's belongs to the era when the tinned sardine had just become a fixture of the British larder. Cheap, long-keeping and needing no cooking, tinned Breton sardines gave Victorian households a reliable fish for high tea, breakfast and the savoury course, and dictionaries of cookery of the period carry pages of them: on toast, in salad, pounded into butter, baked in pastry. Pairing them with spinach follows the older kitchen logic that a rich, oily fish wants a green vegetable dressed in a butter sauce, the same reasoning that puts sorrel beside shad. The garnish of sliced hard-boiled egg was common at the time for anything creamed or made into a mince, and may well have served the double purpose of decoration and of stretching a small quantity of fish across more plates.