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Sardine Sandwiches
Skin and bone the sardines and mash to a paste. Season with lemon juice, cayenne pepper and salt, and spread between thin slices of bread.
A one-line sandwich filling of the kind that filled out afternoon tea and lunch boxes. The original gives no quantities, so the proportions are yours to judge.
- QuantitiesOne standard tin of sardines (about 3.75 oz net, rather less drained) makes roughly six to eight small tea sandwiches. Reckon on a teaspoon of lemon juice per tin and cayenne in the smallest pinch you can manage.
- Skin and boneModern brisling and small sardines are canned soft enough that the spine crushes into the paste unnoticed, and the skin adds flavour. If you are using larger sardines in oil, the backbone is worth lifting out; it stays gritty.
- The oilDrain but do not blot the fish dry. A little of the packing oil is what lets the paste spread; if you have drained it hard, work in a knob of softened butter instead.
- Butter the breadThe recipe omits it, but a thin film of butter on each slice is what keeps a wet fish paste from soaking through. Without it the bread goes soggy quickly.
- "Thin slices"Tea sandwiches of this kind were generally cut from a close-crumbed white loaf, sliced as thin as the bread would allow and usually with the crusts off. A sturdy sandwich bread sliced thin and lightly rolled with a rolling pin gets close.
- Filed under CakesThis is a loose-leaf book, and the sandwich section sits with the tea baking rather than with fish. Nothing about the recipe belongs to cake making.
- Make aheadThe paste keeps a day covered in the refrigerator and improves for the lemon sitting in it. Assemble the sandwiches within a couple of hours of serving.
Canned sardines were among the first industrially preserved foods to become genuinely cheap, and by the late nineteenth century a tin was a common pantry standby and a reliable source of emergency protein. That made sardine paste a fixture of the tea table alongside potted meat and anchovy: shelf-stable, strongly flavoured, and stretched a long way by bread. The cayenne-and-lemon seasoning follows the older English pattern for potted fish, where acid and heat stood in for the freshness the preserving process had taken out. Books issued in binder form were sold so a cook could add her own pages, and sandwich fillings in them tend to be exactly this terse — a formula, not a recipe, because a tea sandwich needed no explaining.