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Anchovies
Fillets of these, put in a lattice work across mashed potato look very nice. Be sure you use good anchovies preserved in salt, and well washed and soaked to take away the greater part of the saltness; or, if you can make some toast butter it when cold, cut it into thin strips, and lay a fillet in the center. Fill up the sides of the toast with chopped hard-boiled yolk of egg.
Two small hors d'oeuvre built on the same idea: a well-soaked anchovy fillet against something bland. Everything depends on getting the salt right.
- Salt-packed anchoviesThese are whole fish buried in salt, sold in tins or by weight at Italian and Greek grocers. Rinse off the salt, split each fish along the backbone with your thumb, lift out the spine and tail, then soak the fillets in cold water or milk for 20-30 minutes and pat dry.
- If you use oil-packed filletsThey are already filleted and far less salty, so skip the soaking entirely -- a brief rinse and a blot on paper towel is enough. Soaking them washes out flavour and leaves them limp.
- The lattice on potatoThe original says only to lay the fillets in a lattice across mashed potato. If your anchovies are very salty, cutting the fillets lengthwise into narrower ribbons will spread them further. The recipe does not say whether the potato is hot or cold; if serving cold, smooth the potato flat and let it set before laying the lattice.
- Butter the toast coldStated in the original and worth respecting. Butter melting into hot toast makes it soft, and these strips need to stay crisp under the fillet until they reach the table.
- Cutting the toastThe original says only 'thin strips'. Fingers roughly three-quarters of an inch wide and long enough to take a single fillet work well. Trim the crusts first, then cut; sawing crusts off after cutting shatters them.
- The yolkThe original calls for chopped hard-boiled yolk. Hard-boil the eggs, cool them, and chop the yolks fine; pressing them through a sieve instead gives a finer crumb that clings better to the buttered edges. The whites are not used here; keep them for a salad.
- YieldA 50 g tin of fillets should give roughly a dozen toast fingers, enough for four to six as an appetiser. Assemble shortly before serving, as the buttered toast softens once the fillets are laid on.
The Belgian Cook Book was published in 1915, compiled from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had come to Britain after the German invasion, and issued in aid of Belgian relief. That origin helps explain its character: many entries are dishes recalled from memory rather than tested, and are short on quantities. This entry is typical -- less a recipe than a note on how anchovies might be presented, as part of the cold hors d'oeuvre that opened a meal. Salt-cured anchovies from the Mediterranean were a familiar item in northern European store cupboards by the nineteenth century, valued because they kept well. Similar pairings of anchovy with a mild starch and sieved or chopped egg yolk turn up in English and French savoury cookery of the same period.