Home › Cooking at the Table › Grilled Sardines
Grilled Sardines
12 large sardines 1 tablespoon lemon juice 6 pieces toast Drain sardines and heat thoroughly in chafing-dish. Turn frequently; add lemon juice and serve on finger-length pieces of toast.
A chafing-dish appetizer from the era when the cooking was part of the entertainment. It is essentially canned sardines warmed in their own oil and sharpened with lemon, so the only real skill is keeping the fish whole.
- Handle them once, gentlyLarge canned sardines fall apart the moment they are hot. Use a thin spatula or two forks and turn them as few times as possible, despite the instruction to turn frequently; two or three turns over three or four minutes is enough.
- What "large sardines" meansThe instruction to drain implies preserved fish rather than fresh, most likely oil-packed sardines of the larger sort rather than small brisling, which are more likely to disintegrate. The recipe gives no tin size or count, so buy by the piece to reach twelve.
- Chafing-dish setupUse the blazer pan directly over the flame, not over the hot-water pan, or the fish will never brown at the edges. A heavy skillet on low heat does the same job if you are not cooking at the table.
- Drain, but keep some oilDrain the tins so the dish does not turn greasy, then add back a teaspoon or two of the packing oil to the pan. The fish need a film of fat under them or they stick and tear.
- Lemon goes in lastAdd the tablespoon of lemon juice off the heat or in the final few seconds, as the recipe's order implies. Held over the flame it cooks away and the brightness is the point of it.
- The toastCut fairly thick white bread into fingers about the length of a sardine and toast them dry and firm. Soft toast collapses under hot oily fish. The recipe does not say whether to butter the fingers, so that is left to you.
- YieldSix pieces of toast, twelve sardines: two per person as a first course or savoury, six servings. As a cocktail snack, cut the toast smaller and split each fish.
Sardines in oil were among the earliest canned foods to be sold as a delicacy rather than merely as provisions, and tinned fish was a common standby in American households of the period. This recipe belongs to the chafing-dish vogue that ran from the 1890s into the interwar years: a spirit lamp and a nickel-plated pan let a hostess cook in front of her guests without a servant, and the dishes that suited the equipment were all small, quick and made from things already cooked or preserved. Warmed sardines on toast fingers also sit in the older British tradition of the savoury, a hot salty mouthful served at the end of dinner instead of a sweet, which American entertaining borrowed and often shifted to the beginning of the evening.