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Sardine Sauce
Mash smooth 5 large sardines that have been skinned and boned, and add to 1 1/2 cupfuls of mayonnaise; serve with cold fish.
A two-ingredient cold sauce of the sort that filled out a Victorian and Edwardian cold table. The only real technique is getting the fish fine enough that it disappears into the mayonnaise.
- Mash properlyPounding the sardines to a genuine paste is what separates this from mayonnaise with fish lumps in it. A mortar, or the flat of a knife blade worked against the board, gives a smoother result than a fork; a small food processor does it in seconds.
- Which sardinesOil-packed sardines are what the recipe assumes. Drain them well before mashing, or the sauce loosens and may split. Skinning and boning is easy with the fingertips, and the backbone in most tinned sardines is soft enough to mash in unnoticed if you prefer to leave it.
- Cupfuls1 1/2 cupfuls is 12 fl oz, about 350 ml, of mayonnaise. That is a generous quantity against five sardines; taste as you go and stop when the fish flavour is where you want it.
- Homemade versus jarredPeriod mayonnaise was made with raw yolks and would generally have been thicker and less sharp than commercial jars. Bought mayonnaise works; if it tastes sweeter than you want, a squeeze of lemon and a grind of pepper will correct it.
- YieldRoughly 1 3/4 cups, enough for eight to ten servings alongside cold fish. It is also a reasonable dressing for hard-boiled eggs, cold potatoes or a plain green salad.
- KeepingRefrigerate covered and use within two days. The fish oil carries flavour into the mayonnaise as it stands, so it will taste noticeably stronger on the second day.
Sardine butters, pastes and sauces were fixtures of the late nineteenth-century cold table, when tinned sardines from Brittany and later from Maine were among the first reliably good preserved fish available to ordinary households. The sauce's purpose was to accompany cold poached fish such as salmon, halibut or turbot, and dishes served cool were generally given assertive sauces. Mayonnaise was well established as a standard kitchen preparation in English-language cookbooks by the later nineteenth century, and stirring a strongly flavoured paste into a base batch was one common way of producing a family of derivative sauces without making each from scratch.