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Fish Sandwiches
Fish used for filling should be pounded to a paste and then mixed with sufficient salad dressing to give it the proper consistency for spreading easily. The same filling as for meat sandwiches given above can be used. Fresh or salt fish may be used: roe, salmon, sardines, lobster, shrimp, etc.
This is a method rather than a formula: a template for turning any cooked fish into a spreadable paste. The proportions are left to the cook, so the judgment calls are worth spelling out.
- The dressing is the hinge"Salad dressing" in a cookbook of this period may well mean a cooked or boiled dressing thickened with egg and flour and sharpened with vinegar rather than a mayonnaise; the recipe does not say which. Either works, but add it a spoonful at a time — the paste should hold a soft peak, not slump, or the bread goes damp within the hour.
- Pounding, without a mortarA food processor does in ten seconds what the original expects of a mortar and pestle, but it overshoots easily and turns lobster or shrimp into wallpaper paste. Pulse, or mash sardines and salmon with a fork and chop shellfish by hand.
- "Salt fish" means soaked and cooked firstSalt cod or salt herring must be soaked through several changes of cold water, then poached and flaked before it goes anywhere near a sandwich. Used straight from the package it is both inedibly salty and raw.
- RoeMost likely cooked fish roe — shad, herring or cod roe, poached or fried and cooled — rather than cured caviar, though the recipe does not specify. Canned cod roe is the closest easy equivalent.
- Canned fish is what this is really forTinned salmon and sardines were cheap pantry staples when this was written, and both still make the best version. Drain sardines well and lift out the backbone if it bothers you; the bones in canned salmon crush into the paste unnoticed.
- QuantityThe recipe gives none. As a rough guide, a 7 oz tin of salmon or two tins of sardines with about 3 tablespoons of dressing will fill around 8 slices of bread, or 16 to 24 small tea sandwiches once the crusts are trimmed.
- AssemblyButter the bread to the edges before spreading the filling; the fat layer keeps moisture out. Made ahead, the sandwiches keep an hour or two covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator, no longer — fish paste and egg dressing both sour quickly at room temperature.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its Five Roses flour, and like most milling-company books it collected household recipes sent in by customers alongside the baking that sold the product. A whole section of small sandwiches belongs to the era when afternoon tea, church socials and card parties demanded trays of small crustless sandwiches. The list of fillings ,, sardines, lobster, shrimp, roe ereach: canned Pacific salmon and imported sardines had become inexpensive enough by the 1910s that a fish sandwich was thrifty rather than luxurious, while fresh lobster and shrimp still marked an occasion.