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Anchovy Biscuits
Made as you would make cheese biscuits, but using anchovy sauce instead to flavor them. If you make the pastry thin you can put some lettuce between two biscuits and press together with a little butter spread inside.
A recipe written in shorthand for cooks who already knew how to make cheese biscuits; the whole instruction is a substitution. Reading it usefully means filling in the parent recipe.
- What "biscuits" means hereThis is the British sense: a thin, crisp savoury cracker or short pastry wafer, not an American soda biscuit. Think of a cheese straw rolled flat and cut into rounds.
- The base recipe impliedCheese biscuits of the period are generally a short rubbed-in pastry, often somewhere in the region of 4 oz flour to 2 oz butter, sometimes bound with an egg yolk and a little liquid; proportions vary from book to book. Where cheese would go, the anchovy sauce goes in with the binding liquid.
- Anchovy sauceNot a pasta sauce and not Worcestershire. The bottled anchovy sauce of the period was a thin, very salty fish seasoning, related to (though usually weaker than) anchovy essence; anchovy paste or Gentleman's Relish thinned with a little water is the closest current equivalent. Start with a teaspoon, since brands vary widely in salt.
- SaltAdd none until you have tasted. Anchovy sauce carries the seasoning, and salted butter plus the sauce will usually be enough.
- OvenThe book gives no temperature. Thin savoury pastry wafers want a hot oven, around 400F, for 8 to 10 minutes, until set and just colouring at the edges. They crisp as they cool.
- "Pastry thin"For the sandwiched version roll to about 1/8 inch or less. Thicker rounds will shatter or push the filling out when pressed together.
- AssemblingButter and lettuce go between the biscuits only at the moment of serving. Anything moist against a crisp savoury wafer softens it within minutes.
- YieldThe book gives no quantities or yield. On the reconstructed 4 oz flour quantity, 2-inch rounds would give something in the order of two dozen biscuits, or a dozen sandwiched pairs.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs. Brian Luck and published in 1915, from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and sold in aid of relief funds. Entries like this one are highly compressed, apparently written for readers assumed to own a general cookery book. Anchovy sauce was a familiar English pantry item, bottled commercially through the nineteenth century and used to season fish and meat, and is not especially associated with Belgian cooking, so this entry may reflect a Belgian cook working with what was on a British shelf. Savoury biscuits of this kind were associated with the savoury course, served after the sweet at a formal dinner or handed round with drinks, and the sandwiched version with lettuce and butter reads as a tea-table adaptation of the same dough.