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Egg and Olive (Yolks of hard-boiled eggs Salt)
Yolks of 3 hard-boiled eggs Salt and paprika 4 chopped olives 1 tablespoon butter 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1 teaspoon anchovy essence Buttered slices of bread Mix the eggs, olives, butter and seasonings to a paste; spread between thin slices of bread, preferably round. 10
A tea-sandwich filling of the kind that filled the savoury end of an Edwardian sandwich tray. The whole thing hinges on texture: this should be a smooth paste, not a chopped salad.
- Sieve the yolksPush the hard-boiled yolks through a fine sieve or mash them thoroughly with a fork before anything else goes in. Lumps of yolk will tear thin bread when you spread the filling.
- Anchovy essenceA bottled Victorian condiment of anchovy, salt and often a little spice and vinegar. Anchovy paste from a tube is the closest current equivalent; use about a teaspoon, or mash one oil-packed anchovy fillet into the butter.
- The olivesThe recipe says only "chopped olives"; green brine-cured olives are the likeliest reading. Chop them fine and blot them dry, or the water will loosen the paste and soak the bread.
- ButterOne tablespoon, thoroughly softened, is doing the binding here. Cold butter will not blend smoothly with the yolks and you will get a crumbly mixture rather than a spread.
- Salt with careOlives, anchovy and salted butter all carry salt. Season at the end, after tasting, rather than at the start as the ingredient list implies.
- PaprikaRead as plain sweet paprika, used for colour and mild warmth; smoked paprika would overwhelm the anchovy.
- Thin slices, roundCut the bread thin, butter it, spread the filling, close, then stamp out rounds with a cutter so the edges seal and no crust shows. Cutting first and filling afterwards makes a mess.
- Yield and keepingKeeping -- The paste can be made a few hours ahead and refrigerated, but assemble close to serving and keep the finished sandwiches under a damp cloth.
The recipe belongs to the great age of the afternoon-tea sandwich, roughly the 1890s through the 1920s, when cookbooks devoted whole chapters to fillings bound with butter and sieved egg yolk and cut into rounds, fingers or hearts. Anchovy essence, the ingredient that dates the page most precisely, was a standard bottled store-cupboard flavouring in British and American kitchens from the nineteenth century onward, sold alongside mushroom ketchup and Worcestershire sauce; it gave cooks a savoury depth without the visible fish. The combination of egg, olive and anchovy shows the period's fondness for a salty, faintly piquant note against very plain white bread.