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Mock Crab Sandwiches
Quarter cup grated cheese, ¼ teaspoon each salt, paprika and mustard, 1 teaspoon anchovy paste, 1 tablespoon chopped olives, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, 2 tablespoons creamed butter.
This is an ingredient list rather than a method, which was normal for sandwich-filling sections of the period: the assumption is that you will mash everything into the softened butter and spread it thin. A few of the terms need translating.
- The method the book leaves outCream the butter until it is genuinely soft and smooth, then work in the cheese, anchovy paste and seasonings, adding the lemon juice and olives last; working the liquid in at the end keeps the paste smooth.
- Creamed butterMeans butter beaten to a spreadable, aerated state at room temperature, not clarified butter and not cream. Two tablespoons is about 28 g.
- Grated cheeseUnspecified, but in a Canadian kitchen of this period that most likely meant cheddar. A quarter cup grated is roughly 25 g; grate it finely on the small holes so the filling spreads rather than tears the bread.
- MustardAlmost certainly dry mustard powder rather than prepared condiment mustard: a quarter teaspoon of powder is assertive, whereas a quarter teaspoon of jarred mustard would barely register here.
- Anchovy pasteStill sold in tubes. Taste before adding the full quarter teaspoon of salt — between the anchovy, the cheese and the olives, the mixture may need none.
- Why it tastes of crabThe illusion rests mainly on the anchovy, with the paprika supplying colour and warmth. Sweet paprika is what is meant here, not hot or smoked.
- Yield and servingMakes something between a third and a half cup of filling, enough for perhaps four to six thin sandwiches; such fillings were usually spread on thin crustless bread cut into fingers or triangles. It firms up in the refrigerator, so let it come back to room temperature before spreading.
"Mock" dishes run all through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery — mock turtle soup made from a calf's head, mock duck from a shoulder of lamb — and they served two purposes: economy, and making an expensive flavour available where the real thing was not. In a book published by a Canadian flour milling company and distributed to households across the prairies, fresh crab was simply not a possibility, while tinned anchovy paste, cheese and bottled olives kept indefinitely on a shelf. Dainty sandwich sections like this one are often associated with the era of the afternoon tea and the ladies' bridge party, when a hostess was said to be judged by a plate of crustless triangles in several colours and flavours.