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Sardine Savory
1 box sardines 1 cup brown sauce Anchovy essence 1 tablespoon sardine oil Remove the sardines from the box and heat them thoroughly in the brown sauce; season with anchovy essence and sardine oil. Serve with egg sandwiches made from graham or rye bread. e
A chafing-dish savory of the sort served at the end of a meal or late in the evening, and one that hinges entirely on restraint: everything in it is already cooked, so the pan is only bringing it up to temperature.
- Heat, do not cookCanned sardines are fully cooked and very delicate. Warm them in the sauce over a low flame for two or three minutes, spooning sauce over rather than stirring, or they will break into paste.
- "1 box sardines"Tins of the period were small, commonly in the region of a quarter-pound; the usual modern tin is about 3 3/4 oz. That serves two as a savory; double it for four.
- Brown sauceThis means a made sauce in the Escoffier sense — espagnole, or a simple roux-based brown gravy built on beef or veal stock — not bottled brown table sauce. One cup is about the yield of 1 tbsp each butter and flour cooked to a nut brown with 1 1/4 cups stock.
- Anchovy essenceA thin, salty anchovy extract sold in bottles, still available in Britain. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water works; start with 1/2 teaspoon, since the sardines and the sauce are already salted, and taste before adding more.
- Sardine oilThe oil from the tin, added at the end for gloss and flavor. Tins packed in olive oil suit this; tins in water leave you nothing to add, so buy accordingly.
- Bones and skinModern sardines have soft, edible bones, but lifting out the backbone with a knife tip gives a smoother result.
- ServingServe straight from the pan, with the egg sandwiches on thin graham or rye alongside as the recipe directs.
The savory is an English course, a small hot salted dish served after the sweet, and fish-based ones were common: anchovy toast, soft roes, sardines in various guises. American books absorbed the form through the fashion for chafing-dish cookery around 1890-1915, when a spirit-lamp chafing dish was a common wedding present and a genre of cookbooks grew up around what could be cooked in one. Canned sardines suited that setting - shelf-stable, already cooked, and packed in their own seasoning oil - and the Norwegian, French and Maine canneries had made them cheap and widely available. The doubling of salt-fish flavor here, sardine plus anchovy essence, is characteristic of the savory course, which was meant to leave the palate sharp rather than sweet.