Anchovies
Anchovies are highly esteemed little seafish, obtained principally from the Mediterranean; some small schools are found along the coast of Great Britain. The fish are attracted to the boats at night by means of lights, and are caught in nets. After the heads have been cut off and the bodies cleaned, they are put in brine and packed in barrels; for the market they are afterward put into bottles. The pickle of the best fish is a clear pink and without sediment; the cheaper sorts are cloudy, and red only on being stirred, with a thick red sediment. The scales are removed from Dutch anchovies; French anchovies are of larger size; both varieties are pale in color. Anchovies should be carefully cleaned, trimmed, and boned, then soak for two hours in cold water; dry with a cloth, and with a silver or plated knife divide the backs.
To serve, lay the halves on a dish, garnish with the white of a hard-boiled egg, chopped fine, and pour over salad-oil.
The bulk of this entry is market description, but the last two sentences are a working recipe: salt-cured anchovies desalted, split, and dressed as a cold appetiser. Nearly everything that needs adjusting concerns the fish you can actually buy now.
- Buy salt-packed, not oil-packedThe instructions assume whole anchovies cured in brine or dry salt, sold loose from a tin or jar. Oil-packed fillets are already boned, trimmed and mild, and will disintegrate if soaked; if that is what you have, skip straight to arranging and dressing them.
- The soak is the hingeTwo hours in cold water is a starting point, not a rule. Taste a fillet at the one-hour mark and again at two; some cures need a change of water, and over-soaked anchovies turn woolly and flat. They should still read as salty, just not punishing.
- Boning a salt anchovyThe fish opens along the belly under thumb pressure and the spine lifts out in one piece with the tail. 'Divide the backs' most likely means splitting each fish into two fillets, which is what you are left with anyway. Note that the recipe bones and trims first, then soaks.
- Why a silver or plated knifeNineteenth-century carbon steel blades reacted with salt and acid, blackening the metal and giving the fish a metallic taint. Stainless steel solves this; any ordinary paring knife is fine, and fingers work better still.
- Dutch and French anchoviesThese trade distinctions are largely gone from retail. What you will find today is Spanish or Italian salt-cured anchovy, plus Cantabrian fillets in oil, which are the premium article.
- Salad-oilIn this period the term means a mild, clean edible oil, usually olive but often nut or refined seed oil. A fruity extra-virgin olive oil is the obvious modern choice; add a squeeze of lemon or a little red wine vinegar if the fish came out very salty.
- Yield and servingReckon three to four whole fish, or six to eight fillets, per person as a first course with bread. The recipe calls only for chopped hard-boiled white; sieved yolk, chopped parsley and thin raw onion also turn up on anchovy plates of this kind.
Anchovy entries like this one belong to the reference half of the late-Victorian household compendium, where the cook was told what to look for in the shop before being told what to do with it: the clear pink pickle against the cloudy, sediment-heavy pickle of cheap barrels was a practical test at a time when goods were sold loose and adulteration was routine. Salted anchovy is one of the oldest surviving preserved foods in European cooking, generally traced back to the Roman fermented fish sauces, and by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it reached British kitchens mainly as an intense seasoning -- anchovy essence, anchovy butter, anchovy paste on toast -- rather than as a fish eaten whole. Serving the split fillets plain with oil and chopped egg, as here, reflects the newer fashion for hors d'oeuvre and cold relishes at the start of a meal, a Continental habit that English and American books were steadily absorbing at the turn of the century.