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Anchovy Cheese Sandwiches
To one cottage cheese add two teaspoons of anchovy essence, one teaspoon of paprika and two tablespoons of chopped parsley. Spread between slices of entire wheat bread.
A three-line filling that depends almost entirely on the quality of the anchovy, and on getting the cheese dry enough to spread without soaking the bread.
- "One cottage cheese""One cottage cheese" probably means one package or portion as then sold; the size is not recorded, and the quantity is genuinely imprecise. Treat about 1 cup (8 oz) as a working quantity and adjust the anchovy to taste.
- Anchovy essenceA thin, strongly salted anchovy extract sold in bottles, once a standard store-cupboard item and now hard to find. Anchovy paste from a tube is the closest current equivalent, though it is thicker and more concentrated; start with a similar amount and taste. Mashed oil-packed fillets also work but add bulk and oil.
- Entire wheat breadAn older term for whole wheat, generally understood to mean flour ground from the whole grain, though period usage of the term was not consistent. Any good dense whole wheat loaf suits it.
- PaprikaA full teaspoon in a cup of cheese reads as a colouring as much as a seasoning, which is how paprika was often used in this period. Start with half and taste, particularly if yours is smoked or hot rather than sweet.
- TextureSmall-curd cottage cheese still carries a lot of whey. Drain it in a sieve for fifteen minutes and mash it smooth, or the filling will slide and wet the bread within the hour.
- SaltAdd none until the end. Anchovy essence and paste are both heavily salted, and the mixture is usually seasoned enough on its own.
- Yield and servingEnough for six to eight sandwiches. For a tea or canapé tray, spread on thin slices, trim the crusts and cut into fingers or triangles; assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep covered and chilled.
Anchovy essence belongs to the long British line of fish-based savoury condiments that runs from Roman garum through the eighteenth-century anchovy "catchup" to Worcestershire sauce, and by the late nineteenth century it was a bottled staple used to sharpen sauces, butters and sandwich fillings. Its pairing here with cottage cheese is a thrifty piece of American practice: fresh unripened cheese was cheap, bland and widely available, and a spoonful of something intensely salty turned it into a savoury spread without cost. The choice of "entire wheat" bread signals the health-reform current that ran through the domestic magazines of the period, whole-grain flour having been championed since the Graham movement of the 1830s and taken up again by domestic-science writers around the turn of the century. Sandwiches and canapés of this kind were built for the afternoon tea and card party, where the point was a small, strongly flavoured mouthful rather than a meal.