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Anchovies with Olives
All the preparations for this dish, with the exception of sautéing the bread, may be made some hours before serving.
Thoroughly wash the anchovies, cut off the fillets, and chop very fine with a sprig of parsley and a few chives, or a slice or two of Bermuda onion; put the whole into a mortar and pound well, adding, meanwhile, a little paprica. Cut some large selected olives in halves, take out the stones, and fill them with the anchovy mixture.
Cut small rounds of bread an inch and a half in diameter and an inch in thickness; remove a crumb, similar in shape to the olive, from the centre of each. Put a little butter into the blazer, and, when hot, sauté the rounds of bread on both sides; drain on soft paper, put an olive in the centre of each and a little mayonnaise over the whole. Five anchovies will suffice to stuff a dozen olives.
A chafing-dish canapé: salt anchovy pounded to a paste, packed into olive halves, set on a fried bread crouton. The only step done at the table is the frying, and it should stay that way.
- Fry last, serve at onceThe bread croutons are the hinge. Fried in butter they hold their crispness for a few minutes only, so the paste, the stuffed olives and the mayonnaise should all be waiting before the pan goes on the heat.
- The blazerThe blazer is the shallow upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame. Any small heavy skillet does the same job; you want enough butter to film the surface, not to deep-fry.
- AnchoviesThe washing and filleting suggest whole salt- or brine-packed anchovies rather than ready-made fillets. Five fish yield ten fillets, so about ten oil-packed jarred fillets substitute; drain and blot them.
- PapricaSimply paprika, spelled as it often was in English cookbooks around 1900. Sweet Hungarian paprika suits the mixture; a pinch is enough, since its job is colour and roundness rather than heat.
- Bermuda onionA mild, flat, sweet onion, the standard salad onion of the period. A slice of Vidalia, Walla Walla or any sweet white onion stands in; a slice of sharp yellow onion will fight the anchovy.
- Mortar or machineA small food processor will do the pounding, though a mortar handles this small a quantity more evenly. Either way the paste should be stiff enough to mound, not loose.
- Olives"Large selected" points to the biggest table olives, on the order of Queen, Gordal or Cerignola. The recipe has you halve them and take out the stones yourself, so buy them unpitted.
- The croutonsRounds an inch and a half across and a full inch thick, with a hollow cut from the centre to seat the olive. A melon baller or a small measuring spoon scoops the cavity cleanly; cut them from a firm close-crumbed loaf, not an airy one.
- YieldTwelve pieces, which is one round of drinks for four to six people. The recipe allows the paste and stuffed olives to be made some hours ahead.
Chafing-dish cookery was a genuine fashion in American cities in the 1890s and early 1900s: the equipment needed no kitchen, and let a hostess produce hot food in the parlour after the theatre or at a late supper. Books like this one filled a chapter with small savouries built on that logic, and the anchovy was a staple of them, since salt-cured fish kept indefinitely in a cupboard and delivered concentrated savour in a mouthful. The dish belongs to the wider Victorian and Edwardian taste for the savoury "bonne bouche" — tiny, salty, served with drinks or at the close of a meal — of which anchovy toast, devilled almonds and olives stuffed with pounded fish were all variations on one idea. The insistence on Bermuda onion dates the book too: Bermuda supplied the American market with early-season mild bulb onions by steamer, and the name functioned as a grade of sweetness long before Vidalia claimed it.