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Lobster and Other Sea Fish (Sardine Canap s)
Sardine Canapés.
Have ready yolks of eggs, cooked until firm, and an equal bulk of sardines, each rubbed to a paste.
Mix thoroughly, and season with salt, pepper and lemon juice. Prepare some bread in the blazer as for anchovy toast; then spread with the sardine mixture and serve at once.
A three-ingredient savoury that lives or dies on the bread: the paste can be made ahead, but the toast must be hot and the assembly immediate.
- The blazerThe blazer is the shallow upper pan of a chafing dish, used directly over the flame without the hot-water bath. A skillet over medium heat does the same job.
- "As for anchovy toast"Presumably the book's anchovy toast method: small trimmed rounds or fingers of bread crisped in the blazer until golden. Aim for crisp through, not merely browned, or the oily paste will soften them within a minute.
- Equal bulk, not equal weightMeasure by volume. The recipe names no quantities, so any figure is a suggestion: the mashed yolks of three hard-cooked eggs against roughly the same loose volume of drained sardines, about half a modern 3.75 oz tin. Yolks alone are called for, which keeps the paste stiff enough to spread.
- The sardinesUse fish packed in olive oil, drained but not blotted dry, and lift out the backbone if the tin is a large-fish pack. Skinless-boneless fillets work and need no picking over.
- Getting it smooth"Rubbed to a paste" means pressed through a sieve or worked in a mortar; a fork gives a coarser result. A short pulse in a small food processor is closest to the original texture.
- SeasoningLemon juice does the real work here, cutting the richness of yolk and oil, so add it by the teaspoon and taste. Sardines are already salted, so season the salt last.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; on the quantities suggested above you might expect roughly eighteen small canapés, enough for six as an appetiser. Serve at once, warm, with the paste at room temperature rather than chilled.
The chafing dish had a long vogue in American entertaining either side of 1900, when a spirit lamp at the table let a hostess cook without a servant and without a kitchen, and books such as this one filled whole sections with the small hot savouries it could manage. Canapé is French for a couch, the bread being the seat on which the topping rests, and the form arrived in English cookery writing as part of the late-Victorian enthusiasm for savouries served at the end of dinner or late in the evening. Tinned sardines made such recipes possible: by the 1890s cans from Brittany and from the Maine coast were cheap, keepable pantry staples, and the same section of these books leans on tinned anchovy, shrimp and lobster for the same reason. The hard-cooked yolk is a period binder, and it turns up in the savoury pastes of the era.