Home › Cakes › Anchovy Sandwiches
Anchovy Sandwiches
Pound the anchovies to a paste and mix with an equal quantity of olives stoned and finely chopped.
Two lines and no quantities, which is typical of sandwich-filling entries in loose-leaf books of this period. The whole thing hinges on how salty your anchovies are.
- Which anchoviesThe original does not say, and could mean either. Whole salt-packed anchovies need rinsing, soaking in cold water or milk for 20-30 minutes, and boning before pounding. Oil-packed fillets from a tin work directly, but drain them and taste before you commit, for the salt will overwhelm the olives.
- PoundingA mortar gives a smoother, more emulsified paste than a machine because the oil works in gradually. A small food processor is faster; pulse rather than run it, or the olives turn to grey slurry.
- Which olivesThe recipe says only "olives", so the choice is open; green olives in brine suit the mixture best. Pit them yourself if you can — pre-stoned olives tend to be wetter. Chop fine but keep some texture, since the anchovy supplies all the smoothness the mixture needs.
- Equal quantityThe original does not say whether by weight or by volume. Roughly 2 oz anchovy fillets to 2 oz stoned olives makes about half a cup of paste, enough for four to six rounds of sandwiches.
- Butter itThe mixture as written is stiff and intensely salty. Creaming in an equal weight of softened unsalted butter, as anchovy-butter mixtures of the period often did, makes it spreadable and gives the salt somewhere to go. A little lemon juice or cayenne would not be out of place.
- Bread and holdingThin white bread, crusts off, cut into fingers or triangles suits it, though the original says nothing about the bread. The paste keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator, but assemble the sandwiches within an hour or two of serving or the bread goes damp.
- Why it sits under CakesProbably nothing to do with the recipe: loose-leaf cookbooks were sold as ring binders with sheets meant to be rearranged by the owner, so a page can end up under a heading that has no bearing on its contents.
Anchovy essence and sauce were staples of the English and American larder from the eighteenth century onward, though the familiar commercial pastes sold in pots and jars are largely a nineteenth-century product; all were used to sharpen sauces, savouries and sandwich fillings. Sandwiches of this type belong to the tea table and the card party rather than to a meal: small, salty, cut thin, and meant to be eaten with the fingers alongside something to drink. The pairing with chopped olives points to the same fashion that produced olive-and-nut and olive-and-cream-cheese fillings in American cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s, when tinned and bottled olives became cheap and widely available. Recipes as compressed as this one assumed a cook who already knew the form and needed only the proportion.