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Grilled Sardines
Drain twelve sardines and cook in a chafing-dish until heated, turning frequently. Place on small oblong pieces of dry toast, and serve with Maître d'Hôtel or
A chafing-dish savoury from the era when tinned sardines were a fashionable convenience food. The text breaks off mid-sentence; the missing words are almost certainly a second sauce option, and maitre d'hotel butter alone will carry the dish.
- The chafing-dishA chafing dish is a shallow metal pan over a spirit lamp, usually with a water jacket beneath. Cook these directly in the blazer pan with the water pan removed, or simply use a small skillet over low heat -- the point is gentle warming, not frying.
- Heated, not cookedTinned sardines are already fully cooked. Two to three minutes total, turning once or twice, is enough; longer and they dry out and break apart when lifted.
- Drain but keep the oilOil-packed sardines drain to almost nothing in the pan, so a teaspoon of the tin oil or a knob of butter keeps them from sticking. Water-packed or tomato-packed fish behave differently and are not what the recipe assumes.
- Turning frequentlyUse a thin spatula or two forks. Sardines this size are structurally fragile once warm, and tongs will crush them.
- The toast"Dry toast" means toast made without butter, cut into fingers roughly the length of a sardine. Toast it well ahead so it is genuinely crisp -- soft toast collapses under the oil.
- Maitre d'hotel butterButter creamed with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, then chilled. A coin of it laid on each hot sardine melts down into the toast; the lemon is the whole reason the dish works.
- YieldTwelve sardines serve three or four as a savoury or first course.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in American households around 1900: a spirit lamp and a metal pan let a hostess cook at the table without a servant or a kitchen fire, which suited late suppers, bachelor rooms and the new fashion for informal entertaining. Sardines were the ideal chafing-dish ingredient because the tin did the cooking -- canned in oil in Brittany and later in Maine, they arrived shelf-stable and needed only warming. Dishes of this kind sat in the English tradition of the savoury, a small hot salty course served near the end of dinner, and the pairing with maitre d'hotel butter is straight out of French professional practice, where the same parsley-and-lemon butter was the standard finish for grilled fish of any size.