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Anchovy Toast
Put about two tablespoonfuls of clarified butter into the blazer. When hot add bread cut as for sandwiches. Brown the bread on one side, turn, and brown the other side. Spread with anchovy paste and serve at once.
A chafing-dish recipe of three steps, written for a piece of equipment most kitchens no longer own. Everything here translates to a skillet without loss.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, sitting directly over the flame; the hot-water bath below it goes unused for frying like this. A small heavy skillet over medium heat does the same job.
- Clarified butterButter with the milk solids removed, so it will take frying heat without the flecks browning and burning. Ghee is a close stand-in and is sold ready-made, though it is simmered longer and tastes nuttier; two tablespoons should fry a few slices before you need more.
- Bread cut as for sandwichesTaken to mean a firm white loaf sliced thin, and crusts often trimmed for sandwich bread of the period, though the recipe says neither. Thin is the point: the toast should shatter rather than bend under the paste.
- Anchovy pasteStill sold in tubes, and still very salty. Spread it thin and taste before adding any further seasoning; a squeeze of lemon or a grind of pepper is the only improvement the dish tolerates.
- Heat and timingThe butter should be hot enough to sizzle at the edge of the bread but not smoking, and each side wants only a minute or two. Bread fried in butter goes from gold to bitter quickly, so watch rather than time it.
- Spread while hotThe instruction to serve at once is the hinge. The paste is meant to soften into the hot surface, and toast fried in butter turns limp within a few minutes of leaving the pan.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity; two tablespoons of butter suits a small batch, cut into fingers or triangles and served as a savoury or a cocktail bite rather than a course.
Anchovy toast belongs to the British savoury course, the small salty dish served after the sweet at dinner, and it crossed into American entertaining along with the chafing dish itself. Chafing-dish suppers were fashionable in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, when a spirit lamp on the table let a hostess cook in front of guests without a servant present, and books of the period devoted whole sections to what could be managed in a single pan. Anchovy paste suited that setting well: shelf-stable, intensely flavoured, and requiring no cooking of its own. Its commercial popularity in the English-speaking world is generally traced to Gentleman's Relish and the various spiced anchovy butters sold in pots from the early nineteenth century onward, all of them descendants of the older practice of pounding salted anchovies with butter to keep.