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Bonnes Bouches de Sardines
(Savoury Sardines.) Ingredients.
Salt, Pepper and Cayenne. Two hard-boiled Eggs. Two ounces and a half of Sardine Paste (half an ounce of Butter, two ounces of Sardines).
A handful of small Cress.
One dessertspoonful of Sweet Oil.
One teaspoonful of Vinegar.
Three ounces of Butter.
The book prints the ingredient list without a method, as was common when a savoury was assumed to follow a standard pattern. What follows is what the quantities tell you, plus the conversions you need.
- What the list impliesTwo and a half ounces of sardine paste, a cress salad dressed with oil and vinegar, and three ounces of butter. The book names no bread, so the form of the bites is a guess: small buttered croûtes or fried bread fingers spread or piped with the paste and garnished with dressed cress would account for the quantities, and on that reading the three ounces of butter is for frying or buttering the bases rather than for the paste, which has its own half ounce.
- Sardine pasteSkin and bone tinned sardines, drain them well, pound two ounces with half an ounce of softened butter and pass through a fine sieve. A small food processor does it in seconds, but the sieving is what gives the smooth, pipeable texture the period expected.
- MeasuresA dessertspoonful is two teaspoons, roughly 10 ml. An ounce is 28 g, so the paste totals about 70 g and the frying butter about 85 g.
- Small cressThis is the cress of mustard-and-cress, sold in punnets as cress or garden cress, cut when the seedlings are an inch or two high. Watercress is a different, coarser plant and will overwhelm the sardine.
- Sweet oilSweet oil means a mild, fresh salad oil, normally olive oil. Use a light olive or a neutral oil; a peppery modern extra virgin fights the vinegar in a dressing this small.
- Croûte basesIf you serve them on croûtes, which the book does not specify, cut white bread a quarter inch thick into fingers or rounds about two inches across and fry in the butter until crisp and dry all through, or bake in a moderate oven until golden. Soft bases collapse under the paste and the dressed cress weeps into them.
- Yield and serviceThese quantities make roughly eight to twelve small bites, a savoury course for four to six. Dress the cress and assemble at the last moment, and serve at room temperature rather than chilled so the butter in the paste is not waxy.
- Sardines have changedVictorian tinned sardines were packed in oil and heavily salted, often matured in the tin for a year or more. Modern tins are milder, so taste before seasoning and add a little cayenne, lemon or anchovy if the paste seems flat.
Bonnes bouches is French for good mouthfuls, and that is exactly what the British savoury course was: one or two hot, sharp, salty bites served after the sweet and before dessert, on the theory, often said to be the reason for the course, that they settled the palate for the port. The savoury is a peculiarly British institution, rare at French tables of the same date even though its dishes carried French names, and sardines, anchovies and soft roes on toast were its backbone. Tinned sardines made the dish possible for a household cook: the Breton canning industry around Nantes had been packing them in oil since the first decades of the nineteenth century, and by the 1890s a tin of French sardines was an ordinary store-cupboard item in Britain. Pounding them with butter and passing them through a sieve turned a cheap preserved fish into something that could be piped and presented, which is precisely the trick a book of high class cookery was selling.