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Watercress for Garnish
Cut some thin slices of brown bread; put two ounces of sardine paste in a mortar, and pound with the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs and one ounce and a half of butter; rub this through a fine sieve and spread it over the slices of bread. Wash the cress and cut it up small, season it with oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, and sprinkle it over the layer of paste. Place another slice of bread on the top and press together. Spread the top of each with butter, and sprinkle over thickly with finely chopped whites of hard-boiled eggs. Cut them into fanciful shapes or strips about an inch wide.
Mix some sardine paste with a little cream or butter, and ornament the surface through a forcing bag, according to taste.
Dish them up neatly on a folded napkin or dish paper, and garnish with some picked watercress.
A late-Victorian savoury sandwich, cut small and piped for the hors d'oeuvre tray. The heading refers to the finishing garnish; the dish itself is watercress and sardine sandwiches.
- Quantities in metricTwo ounces of sardine paste is about 55 g, an ounce and a half of butter about 40 g. With two egg yolks this makes enough spread for perhaps four or five sandwiches, depending how thickly it is laid on; a further quantity of paste is needed for the piped ornament.
- Sardine pasteTinned sardine or anchovy pastes are still sold in tubes and small jars, but you can make the equivalent by mashing drained tinned sardines with a little butter and a squeeze of lemon. Bought paste is much saltier, so taste before adding salt to the cress dressing.
- Mortar and sieveThe pounding and sieving exist only to get a lump-free spread that will pass through a piping tube. A small food processor does both steps at once; sieve afterwards only if you intend to pipe through a fine nozzle.
- Dressing the cressSeason the cress at the last moment and keep the dressing very light, a teaspoon or two of oil to a good handful. Dressed cress weeps quickly and will soak the bread if the sandwiches stand.
- Bread"Brown bread" in this period generally meant a wholemeal loaf rather than a coarse seeded one. Slice it thin and butter the outer faces before cutting so the crumb does not tear.
- Piping the decorationSardine paste slackened with cream pipes cleanly only when cool but not chilled hard. Warm paste slumps; refrigerated paste splits at the nozzle.
- Watercress and washingCultivated watercress from a shop needs only a rinse. Cress gathered from open streams can carry liver fluke and should not be eaten raw.
- ServingThese are a savoury or a cocktail item, not lunch. Assemble no more than an hour ahead, keep covered with a damp cloth, and cut just before serving; the "folded napkin or dish paper" is the period's standard liner, presentational as well as absorbent.
The savoury course sat at the end of a formal British dinner, after the sweet and before dessert, and it ran heavily to anchovy, sardine, cheese and egg in small, sharply seasoned mouthfuls of the kind collected here. Sardine paste belongs squarely to that moment: tinned fish had become cheap and reliable by the later nineteenth century, and pounded fish pastes gave a cook an intense, shelf-stable flavour base that needed no cooking. Watercress was the other half of the equation, grown commercially in the chalk-stream beds of Hampshire and Kent and sent up to London by rail in such quantity that it was among the cheapest green things in the city, sold by street hawkers by the bunch. The insistence on fanciful shapes, piped ornament and a folded napkin is characteristic of the professional and high-class domestic cookery of the period, where the savoury was expected to look as considered as anything that preceded it.