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Mock Anchovies
When sprats are cheap, buy a good quantity, what in England you would call a peck. Do not either wipe or wash them. Take four ounces of saltpeter, a pound of bay salt, two pounds of comcon coarse salt, and pound them well, then add a little cochineal to color it, pound and mix very well. Take a stone jar and put in it a layer of the mixture and a layer of the sprats, on each layer of fish adding three or four bay leaves and a few whole pepper-corns. Fill up the jar and press it all down very firmly. Cover with a stone cover, and let them stand for six months before you use them.
This is a six-month uncooked salt cure for whole ungutted fish, and it sits well outside anything that can be recommended now. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering a workable version.
- The saltpetre quantityFour ounces of potassium nitrate to roughly a peck of sprats is far above any modern curing limit; regulated nitrate/nitrite cures are measured in parts per million and are sold pre-diluted for exactly this reason. Home use of bulk saltpetre by the ounce, with no weight given for the fish, cannot be brought into range by guesswork.
- Ungutted fish, held anaerobicallyUngutted fish, held with little air -- The instruction not to wipe or wash, combined with viscera left in place and the fish pressed down firmly and covered with a stone lid, tends toward the low-oxygen conditions associated with Clostridium botulinum type E, which is linked to fish and grows without oxygen at low temperatures. Salt-cured, uneviscerated fish has been the source of documented botulism outbreaks.
- No temperature is specified anywhereThe fish is never heated, and the recipe gives no storage temperature for the six months. A cure that depends entirely on salt concentration needs both the brine strength and the holding temperature controlled; neither is stated here.
- Cochineal for colourThe dye is there only to imitate the reddish flesh of a true cured anchovy. Cochineal (carmine) is still a legal food colour but is a known allergen for a minority of people, and here it does nothing but disguise the fact that these are not anchovies.
- Bay saltBay salt is sea salt evaporated in shallow pans, coarser and less refined than table salt. It is not a curing salt and carries no nitrite; the preserving action in this recipe comes from sheer bulk of salt plus the saltpetre.
- A peckA peck is a dry measure, two gallons, about 8 quarts. For small oily fish that is somewhere in the region of 10-12 lb, but the recipe never fixes the fish-to-cure ratio, which is precisely the number a safe cure depends on.
- If you want the resultSalt-cured anchovies and anchovy-style sprats are made commercially under controlled brine strength and temperature, and are cheap to buy. For home curing of any kind, use a current recipe with weighed cure and stated holding temperatures.
Sprats are small, oily, herring-family fish that were landed in enormous cheap quantities along the North Sea coast, and turning them into a stand-in for the costlier Mediterranean anchovy was an old and widespread thrift. English cookery books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries carry near-identical "mock anchovy" formulas, usually with saltpetre for firmness and colour retention and cochineal or bole armeniac to fake the red flesh; the Belgian version here reflects the same North Sea fishery and the same household habit of buying a glut and burying it in salt. That this appears in a book compiled to raise money for Belgian relief during the First World War is telling in itself: it is a recipe about laying in protein cheaply and keeping it for half a year, which is the logic of a coastal kitchen long before it is the logic of a cookbook.