Home › Fish Relishes › Anchovies and Olives
Anchovies and Olives
Wash carefully, and cut off the fillets of five anchovies; chop fine, adding a little parsley and onion; pound the whole thoroughly in a mortar, seasoning with a dash of cayenne.
Cut in halves nine Spanish olives, take out the stones, and fill with the anchovy mixture.
Have ready small rounds of bread an inch thick and hollowed in the centre; fry in butter to a light golden brown; drain, and place on a napkin spread upon a dish; lay an olive on each piece, and pour over a little mayonnaise sauce.
A late-Victorian savoury: stuffed olives on fried croutons, meant to close a dinner or sit on a relish plate. The work is all in the anchovies and the croutons.
- Which anchoviesThe recipe assumes whole salt-cured anchovies, which is why they are washed and filleted. Rinse them well, slip the fillets off the backbone with your thumb, and taste before adding any salt elsewhere. Oil-packed tinned fillets can stand in; use about 10 fillets and skip the washing.
- Spanish olivesToday the label "Spanish olives" usually means brine-cured green olives of the Manzanilla or Queen type. Buy them whole with pits rather than pre-stuffed; halving them so each half makes a cup for the filling is easiest lengthwise.
- The mortar is the pointPounding, not chopping, is what makes the anchovy, parsley and onion into a paste stiff enough to hold in an olive half. A small food processor works, but stop before it turns to liquid. Grate or mince the onion very fine first, or it will stay in shreds.
- Onion quantityNo amount is given. A teaspoon of finely grated onion and a tablespoon of parsley for five anchovies keeps the fish in front; more onion turns it sharp.
- The croutonsAn inch-thick round of firm white bread, hollowed with a small spoon or the end of a knife, is essentially a bread case. Cut them 1 1/2 to 2 inches across so an olive half sits in the depression. Day-old bread hollows cleanly; fresh bread tears.
- FryingButter alone browns and burns quickly at the temperature needed. Use half butter and half a neutral oil over medium heat, turn the rounds as they colour, and drain them on paper. The napkin in the original is the liner of the serving dish, not the draining surface.
- MayonnaiseHomemade mayonnaise here is uncooked. If you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or a good commercial mayonnaise thinned with a little lemon juice so it pours.
- YieldNine olives halved gives 18 pieces, so cut 18 bread rounds. The recipe gives no serving count; as a plate of small bites alongside other relishes it will stretch to six or eight. Assemble shortly before serving, as the croutons soften once the mayonnaise is on.
Anchovy relishes of this kind belong to the English savoury course, the small salted or sharp mouthful served after the sweet. Salt anchovies were one of the few reliably strong-flavoured preserved fish in the nineteenth-century larder, sold whole in casks or kegs and used as much as a seasoning as a fish; anchovy paste, anchovy butter and anchovy sauce all appear in books of the period for the same reason. The pairing with Spanish olives and the mayonnaise suggest a dish with some pretension rather than a household economy.