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Tartines à la Lucullus (Pastry Sandwiches of Anchovy)
(Pastry Sandwiches of Anchovy Paste.) Ingredients.
Half a pound of Puff Paste. Two Yolks of Eggs hard boiled.
Two ounces of grated Parmesan.
One tablespoonful of Anchovy Paste.
The book gives quantities but no method, which was normal for a professional manual whose readers already knew how puff paste behaves. Everything below is about filling that gap without wrecking the pastry.
- The hinge: bake the pastry, then fill itAnchovy paste and Parmesan spread inside raw puff paste weep salt and fat and stop the layers rising. Roll the paste thin, cut into fingers or rounds, bake, then split and sandwich while still warm.
- Puff paste quantityHalf a pound is 8 oz, about 225 g of commercial all-butter puff pastry. Roll it to about 3 mm and chill it again before it goes near the oven.
- Oven heatThe book gives none. For modern purposes puff paste wants a hot oven, around 425-450F. Ten to twelve minutes for thin fingers, until the layers are set and dry rather than merely coloured.
- Anchovy pasteThe Victorian article was broadly comparable to modern tubed anchovy paste, though nineteenth-century commentators record examples coloured with bole and heavily salted. One tablespoonful for eight ounces of pastry is assertive; add no salt anywhere else.
- ParmesanTwo ounces finely grated is roughly two-thirds of a cup, loosely packed. Mix about half of it into the anchovy paste to bind it and scatter the rest over the tops before baking.
- "Tartine"In French usage a tartine is a slice of bread spread with something. Here the book has borrowed the word for a pastry sandwich, so expect a thin flat finger, not a puffed vol-au-vent.
- Yield and serviceEnough for about a dozen small fingers, six to eight servings as a savoury. They must go to the table hot; cold anchovy pastry turns leaden.
The tag à la Lucullus is nineteenth-century menu shorthand for extravagance, borrowed from Lucius Licinius Lucullus, the Roman general whose banquets were a byword for excess in antiquity and who is still invoked in the phrase "a Lucullan feast". In French kitchen practice the name was attached to dishes garnished with truffle or foie gras, and by extension to anything meant to sound costly; here it dresses up a very cheap pair of ingredients. The dish belongs to the savoury course, a distinctly British institution that arrived after the sweet and before dessert, and which is traditionally said to have existed to give the gentlemen something salt to take with the last of the wine. Anchovy in some form (essence, paste, or Gentleman's Relish) was among the flavourings associated with that course through the late Victorian and Edwardian decades.