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Curried Sardines
Mix together one teaspoonful, each, of sugar and curry powder and a saltspoonful of salt. Put these into the blazer with one cup of cream and half a teaspoonful of lemon juice. Stir until the mixture is hot, then put into it ten or twelve sardines. In the mean time, heat some butter or oil in a second blazer, and in it sauté some bits of bread a little larger than the sardines, and round slices of tart apple. Serve each sardine on a bit of bread; pour a little of the sauce over the top and garnish with a round of apple. The slices of apple will keep their shape, if the apples be cored and then cut into rounds without paring.
A chafing-dish supper dish that comes together in under ten minutes, provided the sauce is treated gently. Nothing here is difficult; the risk is overcooking.
- BlazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, the one that sits directly over the flame. A wide skillet or saute pan does the same work. The recipe assumes two of them going at once, so use two pans.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter of a teaspoon. With canned sardines, which are already salted, taste before adding it at all.
- The cream and the lemonHalf a teaspoon of lemon juice in a cup of cream is a very small amount of acid, and heavy cream will generally take it without breaking. Lighter creams are more prone to curdling, especially if the pan gets past a bare simmer, so keep the heat gentle.
- Sardines in oilSardines -- Ten or twelve sardines is roughly two to three standard small tins. Drain them well, and lift them out whole; they fall apart easily once warm.
- How long the sardines stay inThey are already cooked. Two or three minutes in the hot cream to warm through is the limit; longer and they collapse into the sauce and turn dry inside.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powders of the period were generally milder and more turmeric-forward than many modern blends. If you are using a bright commercial madras blend, start with half the teaspoon; the recipe already has you warm it in the cream before the sardines go in, which keeps it from tasting raw.
- The apple roundsThe instruction to core the apple and slice it crosswise with the skin on is the practical hinge here: the peel is what holds each ring together in the pan. Cut them about a quarter inch thick and use a firm tart apple such as Granny Smith or Braeburn.
- YieldTen or twelve sardines serves four as a first course or a light supper, two or three to a plate.
This comes from the chafing-dish vogue that ran through American entertaining in the 1890s and 1900s, when a spirit lamp and a blazer pan let a hostess cook at the table without servants, and late suppers after the theatre or a card party became a fashionable form of hospitality. Sardines were ideal for it: tinned, imported, always in the cupboard, and needing no butchering or long cooking. The curry powder is equally of its moment, an Anglo-Indian pantry item that reached American shelves as a single mixed jar and was used as a general seasoning rather than as the basis of an Indian dish. The combination of curry, cream and fried apple turns up often enough in the period, though how deliberately the apple was meant to answer the chutney or sweet relish that convention said a curry required is not something the record settles.