Anchovies, Fried
INGREDIENTS. -1 tablespoonful of oil, 1/2 a glass of white wine, sufficient flour to thicken, 12 anchovies.
AVERAGE COST for this quantity, 9d.
Mix the oil and wine together, with sufficient flour to make them into a thickish paste; cleanse the anchovies, wipe them, dip them in the paste, and fry of a nice brown colour.
TIME. hour.
SEASONABLE all the year.
Anchovies, Potted, or Anchovy butter. INGREDIENTS.-2 dozen anchovies, lb. of fresh butter, cayenne, pounded mace.
AVERAGE COST, 2s.
Wash the anchovies thoroughly; bone and dry them, and pound them in a mortar to a paste. Mix the butter and seasoning gradually with them, and rub the whole through a sieve. Put it by in small pots for use, and carefully exclude the air with a bladder, as it soon changes the colour of anchovies, besides spoiling them.
APPLE CHARLOTTE. parsley, a few drops of lemon juice, Nepaul pepper or cayenne, butter for frying. AVERAGE COST, 2d. each.
Cut the bacon into little squares each large enough to roll round an oyster, sprinkle over each the chopped herbs, lay on the oysters, season with the pepper and a drop of lemon juice, roll up and run on a skewer and fry in butter till the bacon is cooked. Cut the bread into squares or stamp out small rounds and fry them a bright golden colour and on each lay an oyster. Serve very hot garnished with lemon and parsley.
TIME.-3 minutes to fry the oysters.
This page is a scrambled column from the printed book: a batter for fried anchovies, a potted anchovy butter, and the tail end of what is plainly angels on horseback (the oysters-in-bacon savoury) all run together, with several quantities lost in the setting. Treat them as three separate short recipes.
- Which anchoviesVictorian recipes mean whole salt-cured or brine-packed anchovies, not the limp oil-packed fillets in a flat tin. Salt-packed fish need rinsing and a soak of 20-30 minutes in cold water or milk before frying, then draining and patting dry; oil-packed fillets are already mild and will only need blotting.
- The missing measurementsA "glass" in recipes of this period is usually reckoned as a wineglassful, roughly 2 fl oz, so half a glass is only an ounce or so (30-60 ml); "sufficient flour to thicken" is a judgement call -- work in flour a spoonful at a time until the paste coats a spoon thickly. The butter quantity in the potted recipe has dropped out of the text; a quarter-pound (115 g) to two dozen anchovies gives a spreadable butter, half a pound a milder one.
- FryingThe stated "TIME. hour" is a printing casualty. Batter-dipped anchovies need 350-375F (175-190C) fat and one to two minutes, until the coating is set and pale gold. They are small and already salty-firm; longer and they toughen and go bitter.
- Pounding the potted butterA mortar was the only option when this was written; a small food processor does it in seconds. The sieving step still matters, since anchovy bones and skin do not break down and leave a gritty butter. Use the butter soft, not melted, or it will split when it chills.
- The bladder, and how long it keepsA pig's bladder tied over the pot was the period's airtight seal. Press the butter into small jars, smooth the surface, cover with a thin layer of clarified butter and clingfilm, keep it refrigerated, and use it within a week; this is a short-term potted paste, not a shelf-stable preserve, whatever the original implies about putting it by.
- Nepaul pepperA ground red chilli imported from the Himalayan foothills, sold in Victorian grocers as a milder alternative to cayenne. Cayenne, given as the alternative in the text, is the direct substitute; use a scant pinch.
- The oyster savouryStreaky bacon cut thin enough to wrap without splitting is essential, and it should be cooked just until crisp at the edges, three minutes at most, so the oyster inside is barely set. The fried bread croutes can be made ahead and warmed; the oysters cannot.
- Costs and yieldThe prices in pence and shillings are pre-decimal and of no practical use beyond showing anchovies were a cheap store-cupboard fish and the potted butter a comparatively costly luxury. Twelve fried anchovies serve two as a savoury; the butter fills two or three small ramekins; angels on horseback are counted per person, two or three each.
Anchovies were the Victorian kitchen's chief source of savoury depth, sold salted in kegs and worked into essence, sauce, paste and potted butter long before anyone in Britain talked about umami. Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management and its later abridgements, of which All About Cookery is one, gave them a long alphabetical run because they turned up at every meal: on toast at breakfast, in sauces for boiled fish at dinner, and as the small hot savoury served after the sweet course and before dessert in the Victorian and Edwardian dinner order. That savoury course is why the oyster-and-bacon recipe caught on the end of this page belongs here at all; it is angels on horseback, a dish generally traced to the same late-nineteenth-century English table and named, it is often said, for the way the bacon rides the oyster on its skewer.