Sardine Rarebit
Broil the sardines. Toast some narrow strips of bread on one side and place the sardines on the untoasted side. Set in the oven until the sauce is made. For every twenty sardines use the following ingredients: Melt one tablespoon of butter, add two tablespoons of grated cheese, stir until the cheese is melted and add gradually the beaten yolk of an egg mixed with one-fourth of a cup of thin cream. Stir until smooth and thickened; add half a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of tabasco sauce, and pour over the sardines, a few spoonfuls to each sardine. Serve at once with quarters of lemon.
A late-Victorian chafing-dish savoury built on tinned sardines and a small egg-thickened cheese sauce. Nothing here is difficult, but the sauce is unforgiving of heat.
- The hinge: the sauce must not boilOnce the yolk and cream go in, keep the pan below a simmer or over hot water. A yolk-bound cheese sauce curdles at around 180F and will break into grains and butterfat with no way back.
- SardinesThe recipe does not say, but tinned sardines in oil were the usual pantry form in this period and are the likeliest reading. If using tinned, drain them well and blot them, or the oil will thin the sauce and slick the toast.
- "Broil"Grill them close under a hot element or in a very hot dry pan, a minute or two a side. If they are tinned they are already cooked, so this is only to colour and heat through, and they will fall apart if worked over.
- Setting them in the ovenRead as holding rather than further cooking, since it lasts only as long as the sauce takes. The recipe gives no temperature; a low oven or warming drawer will do.
- Toasting one side onlyThe recipe is explicit about placing the fish on the untoasted side. The likely reasoning is that the soft side takes the fish and sauce while the crisp underside keeps the strip from collapsing.
- Thin creamLight cream or half-and-half, roughly 18 percent fat. Heavy cream will make the sauce claggy; whole milk will make it thin and more likely to break.
- Grated cheeseUnspecified in the recipe; a dry aged Cheddar or a Parmesan-type would both suit. Two tablespoons is a small quantity; grate it fine so it melts before the pan gets hot.
- The tabascoA full teaspoon in a sauce made from one tablespoon of butter and a quarter cup of cream is aggressive by current taste. Start with a few dashes and add to your own liking.
- YieldTwenty sardines on narrow toast strips serve four to six as a savoury or first course, not as a main dish.
The rarebit family, from Welsh rabbit onward, covers any hot cheese sauce poured over toast, and American cookbooks of the turn of the century extended it to oysters, tomatoes, crab and, as here, sardines. Sardines were a natural candidate: cheap, shelf-stable, imported from Brittany and, from the later nineteenth century, packed in Maine, and already a fixture of the sandwich and canape pages of the same books. Dishes of this sort were often associated with the chafing dish, then enjoying real popularity for late suppers and after-theatre entertaining, where a hostess could cook in the room in front of guests. The sauce is bound with egg yolk and cream rather than a flour roux, and is meant to be eaten the moment it is made, as the recipe insists.