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Anchovy Sandwiches
Toast some bread, and butter it. Have ready some filleted anchovies, baste them over with a spoonful of salad oil, pepper and lemon-juice; lay these fillets between two pieces of toast quite evenly, press them together and cut in neat squares. Dish up quickly while the toast is hot.
Angels on Horseback.
Ingredients.
A savoury of the simplest kind, and it lives or dies on timing: the toast must be hot and the sandwich cut and served at once, or the butter congeals and the toast goes leathery. Note that the last line of the transcription, "Angels on Horseback. Ingredients.", is the heading of the following recipe, not part of this one.
- The hingeEverything is assembled at the last moment. Have the anchovies filleted, dressed and waiting before the bread goes near the fire, so the toast travels from grill to plate in under a minute.
- Anchovies then and nowVictorian kitchens often bought salt-packed anchovies whole and filleted them, which meant rinsing off the cure and lifting the flesh from the bone, though bottled and tinned anchovies were also sold by this date. Modern tinned fillets in oil come ready filleted and are generally milder; drain them and skip the extra oil if they seem oily enough.
- If you use salt-packed fishRinse under cold water, soak 15-30 minutes, change the water once, then pat dry. Otherwise the salt will overwhelm the butter and lemon entirely.
- "Baste them over"This just means to turn the fillets in the dressing so each is coated. A spoonful of oil, a good grind of pepper and the juice of a quarter lemon is enough for two tins' worth.
- Salad oilIn this period the term almost always means olive oil. A mild, not peppery, oil suits the fish best.
- The toastCut thin and toast on both sides, then butter while hot. Thick modern sandwich bread makes a clumsy result; a firm white loaf sliced about 1 cm is closer to what was intended.
- SaltAdd none. Between the cure, the butter and the fish itself there is plenty, and the pepper and lemon are there to cut it.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. Two rounds of toast and one 50 g tin of fillets will cut into about eight small squares, which serves two to four as a savoury at the end of a meal.
Anchovy sandwiches belong to the British savoury, the small, sharply salted course served after the sweet and before the dessert fruit in late-Victorian and Edwardian dining, and said by tradition to have been taken instead of a sweet by men at the club table. Anchovy was one of the mainstays of that course, alongside cheese, mushroom, marrow, devilled kidneys and oysters: anchovy toast, anchovy butter, Gentleman's Relish, Scotch woodcock, and this sandwich, all trading on a preserved Mediterranean fish that reached British kitchens in salt-packed kegs and tins.