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Tartar Sandwiches
Chop together 3 large sardines, 1 cup boiled ham (ground) and 3 small cucumber pickles. Add 1 teaspoon French mustard, or omit the cucumber pickles and add some chow-chow with a little mustard.
Mix to a paste with a little catsup and vinegar or lemon juice.
A sandwich paste rather than a cooked dish, so the only real decisions are proportion and texture. Everything in it is already cooked or cured, which is why the method is nothing but chopping and binding.
- "3 large sardines"Almost certainly the tinned kind packed in oil; drain them. Three large ones from a standard tin come to roughly 2 oz of fish, though tins vary a good deal; if your tin holds only small sardines, use five or six.
- Boiled ham, groundAny cooked ham will do — deli ham, or the end of a baked ham. One cup ground is about 5 oz. Pulse it in a food processor rather than pureeing; the filling wants some grain.
- French mustardIn this period the term means a smooth, mild, vinegar-forward prepared mustard — Dijon is the closest common equivalent. Not the sharp English mustard powder, which would overwhelm the sardine at a full teaspoon.
- Chow-chowA mixed vegetable pickle relish; recipes vary, but cabbage, onion, green tomato and pepper in a mustard-spiced brine is typical. Sold in some supermarkets and more readily in Southern US and Canadian Maritime groceries; a coarse mustard piccalilli substitutes well.
- Cucumber pickles"Small cucumber pickles" most likely means gherkin-sized pickles, and probably sour rather than sweet, though the recipe does not say. Chop them fine and blot them, or the paste turns loose.
- BindingAdd the catsup and acid a teaspoon at a time. The ham and sardine oil carry most of the moisture already, and an over-wet paste will soak through thin bread within minutes.
- SaltSardines, cured ham, pickles and catsup are all salty. Taste before adding any, which the original wisely does not.
- Yield and servingEnough for about 12 to 16 small tea sandwiches on thin white bread, crusts trimmed. Butter the bread lightly first as a barrier, and assemble no more than an hour or two ahead.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal in the 1910s, assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian women who baked with Five Roses flour — which may go some way toward explaining why a fish-and-ham paste sits in a chapter alongside dozens of cakes and breads. "Tartar" here is probably borrowed from tartar sauce rather than from steak tartare, though the derivation is not documented: the defining notes are chopped pickle, mustard and acid, the same combination that dresses fried fish, applied to a sandwich filling. Chapters of "dainty sandwiches" were common in period cookbooks, driven by the afternoon tea and card-party habit, and they lean heavily on tinned and potted goods — sardines, deviled ham, pimento — the shelf-stable luxuries of the day.