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Toasted Sardine Sandwiches
Bread 1/2 cup grated cheese 2 tablespoons butter 1 can boneless sardines Cut bread with round cookie cutter, spread with cheese and butter, mixed; place sardine on each, broil quickly and serve hot.
A canapé rather than a sandwich in the closed sense: rounds of bread, a cheese-butter spread, a sardine, and a fast pass under the heat. The whole thing hinges on how briefly it broils.
- Broiler timing"Broil quickly" means two to three minutes under a preheated broiler, just until the cheese slumps and the edges of the bread color. Sardines are already fully cooked in the can; longer heat only dries them and drives off oil.
- Toast one side firstUntoasted bread under a broiler goes soft where the spread sits. Toast the rounds lightly on one side, then build on the untoasted face so the base stays firm enough to lift.
- Boneless sardinesThe term meant sardines packed in oil with the bones removed. Any brisling or sardine fillet in oil works; drain them well on paper so the oil does not soak the bread.
- The cheeseA half cup of grated cheese with 2 tablespoons butter gives a stiff paste. The recipe does not say which cheese; a firm dry grating cheese such as aged cheddar will hold its shape better than a soft young one.
- QuantitiesOnly the cheese, butter and sardines are measured; bread is left to the cook. Can sizes and fillet counts vary, so the number of rounds the spread and the tin will cover has to be judged in the kitchen; fillets may need splitting to stretch to the rounds.
- Yield and servingThe amounts given will make a small plateful of rounds, an appetizer for a few people. They must go to the table hot; once cool the butter sets and the texture turns waxy.
- Use the scrapsCutting circles from sliced bread leaves a good deal of each slice as trim. The trimmings can be dried out in a low oven for crumbs rather than thrown away.
Canned sardines were one of the great convenience foods of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries -- shelf-stable, cheap, already cooked, and sold in tins small enough that a household could open one for a single course. They appear often in American "fancy sandwich" and chafing-dish cookery, which favored hot savory dishes needing no butchering and no long cooking. The round cookie cutter suggests the tea-table and card-party end of that repertoire, where uniform little shapes were cut from ordinary sandwich bread.