Sardine Savouries
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-8 sardines, 2 slices of stale bread, a dessertspoonful each of anchovy and Worcester sauce, 2 oz. of butter, a dessertspoonful of flour, cayenne, water and lemon-juice: butter for frying.
AVERAGE COST, 18.
Having fried the croûtons, scale and bone the sardines, and pound them in a mortar with the butter, and spread upon the croûtons. Make a mixture of the other ingredients with rather less than 1/2 pint of water, and simmer till the flour is well cooked, keeping the croûtons hot meanwhile; then pour the sauce over the croûtons, and serve as hot as possible.
A savoury from the era when a hot, salty morsel closed the dinner rather than opened it. The whole thing takes fifteen minutes, and the only real difficulty is keeping the fried bread crisp under a poured sauce.
- The hinge: sauce at the last secondThe croûtons are fried bread spread with sardine butter, and a thin sauce poured over them turns them to sponge within a minute. Have plates hot, pour at the table if you can, and carry them straight through.
- CroûtonsCut the stale bread into six neat rounds or fingers, crusts off, and fry in butter until golden on both sides. Drain on paper and keep warm while you make the sauce.
- Scaling and boning sardinesProbably written for tinned sardines, which in this period were packed whole and unfilleted, though the instruction to scale them may point to fresh fish. Modern tins are largely cleaned already; drain the oil well, lift out any obvious spine, and pound eight of them with the 2 oz butter — a small food processor does it in seconds.
- Anchovy sauceA bottled Victorian condiment, thinner and sharper than today's anchovy paste. Use about a teaspoon of anchovy paste or essence loosened with water in place of the dessertspoonful, or you will overwhelm the sardines.
- A dessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons, or roughly 10 ml. The measure sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon and was standard in British books of this date.
- Half a pintAn Imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so "rather less than 1/2 pint" is about 9 fl oz, a little over a cup. With only two teaspoons of flour this is a pouring sauce, not a coating one — that is intentional.
- Cooking the flourThere is no roux here; the flour goes in raw. Slake it with a spoonful of cold water first or it will lump, then simmer five to eight minutes so the raw taste cooks out.
- SeasoningSardines, anchovy and Worcester sauce are all salty. Add no salt until you have tasted, and be sparing with the cayenne — a pinch, not a spoonful. The lemon juice goes in at the end, off the heat.
- YieldSix small savouries, one per person, as the last course of a dinner. As a lunch dish for two or three, double the bread and the sauce.
The savoury course — a hot, salty, often anchovy-laced trifle served after the sweet and before dessert — was a peculiarly British institution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Mrs Beeton's later editions carry dozens of them: anchovy toasts, devilled biscuits, cheese ramekins, sardines on croûtons. Tinned sardines made such dishes possible at short notice, and the "average cost, 1s." here reflects a dish assembled almost entirely from store-cupboard goods. Anchovy sauce and Worcester sauce belonged to the same shelf of bottled savours that Victorian cooks reached for whenever a dish needed depth without time, and the instruction to scale and bone the sardines is a reminder that early tinned fish arrived far less prepared than the fillets sold now.