Home › Sandwiches and Canapes › Mock Crab Sandwiches
Mock Crab Sandwiches
To half a cup of grated cheese add four tablespoons of creamed butter, half a teaspoon each of salt, paprika and mustard, one teaspoon of anchovy paste and vinegar and two tablespoons of chopped olives. Spread between rounds of white bread.
A cheese-and-anchovy spread whose name promises seafood it never contains. The whole thing hinges on the butter being soft enough to beat the cheese into a paste.
- Creamed butterFour tablespoons means half a stick, beaten alone until pale and smooth before anything else goes in. Cold butter will leave the mixture grainy and impossible to spread on soft bread.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" is unspecified; a dry, sharp store cheese of the sort now sold as aged Cheddar is the likeliest reading, and grates and binds best here. Half a cup grated is roughly 2 oz. A young or moist cheese will not bind into a paste.
- Anchovy pasteStill sold in tubes and close enough in character to be used as written. Add the half teaspoon of salt last, after tasting.
- VinegarThe recipe gives one teaspoon of anchovy paste "and vinegar" — read as a teaspoon of each. Plain cider or white wine vinegar; it is there to sharpen the cheese and suggest the tartness of a crab dressing.
- MustardMost likely dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard, which would add liquid and slacken the spread.
- OlivesType unspecified; green olives in brine, pitted and chopped fine, are the usual reading. Drain them well, or the moisture will soak into the bread.
- Rounds of breadCut with a biscuit cutter from thin-sliced white sandwich bread, crusts discarded — a tea-sandwich shape, not a lunch portion. The recipe gives no yield; the quantity of spread is small, enough for a plate of little rounds.
- HoldingThe spread can be made ahead and kept covered in the refrigerator, but bring it back to room temperature before spreading. Assemble the sandwiches shortly before serving.
"Mock" dishes run all through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery — mock turtle, mock duck, mock oysters, mock apple pie — and they work in two directions: some stretch a household budget, others simply amuse. This one belongs to the second sort. Crab was perishable and awkward inland, and a cook could produce something with the salt-marine tang and pale flecked look of a crab filling from a cheese crock, a tube of anchovy paste and a few olives. The trick lies in the anchovy, which supplies the savory, faintly oceanic note that the palate reads as shellfish.