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Sardine Sandwiches
Remove skin and bones from sardines, and mash to a paste. Add to an equal quantity of yolks of "hard-boiled " eggs rubbed through a sieve. Season with salt, cayenne, and a few drops of lemon juice; moisten with olive oil or melted butter. Spread mixture between thin slices of buttered bread prepared as for Bread and Butter Folds.
A simple bound spread, and the only real variables are the sardines and how finely you work the egg yolk. Farmer assumes you have already read her instructions for Bread and Butter Folds a few pages earlier.
- Bread and Butter FoldsThe cross-reference means: butter the cut face of the loaf before slicing, cut a very thin slice, trim the crusts, then fold rather than stacking two slices. Buttering before slicing is the trick that lets the slice be thin without tearing.
- Sardines then and nowA tin of sardines in 1896 was often a larger fish packed in oil with skin and backbone intact, hence the instruction to remove them. Many tins sold now hold small brisling or sild with soft, edible bones; where that is the case, mash them in and skip the boning.
- ProportionsEqual quantities of mashed sardine and sieved yolk; Farmer does not say whether she means by weight or by volume.
- Sieving the yolksPushing cooked yolk through a fine sieve gives a dry powder that absorbs the fish oil and keeps the paste from turning greasy. A fork mash leaves lumps that show through a thin slice of bread.
- CayenneFarmer's seasonings are deliberately restrained; a few grains of cayenne, not a pinch. It should sharpen the fish rather than register as heat.
- MoisteningAdd the oil or melted butter a teaspoon at a time until the paste just holds together. Reserved oil from the sardine tin works and is more strongly flavoured than olive oil.
- Holding themCut and cover with a damp cloth, then refrigerate; the filling is moist enough to soften thin bread within an hour or two, so assemble close to serving.
Sandwiches occupy a short section in Fannie Farmer's 1896 book because the late-Victorian afternoon tea, reception and railway luncheon all demanded small, tidy, one-handed food, and the tinned-fish trade had made sardines cheap and ubiquitous in American pantries by the 1880s. Canned sardines packed in oil kept well on a shelf, which put a savoury protein within reach of households with no icebox worth the name, and they turn up throughout the period in sandwiches, canapés and salads. The pairing with sieved hard-boiled yolk is a standard nineteenth-century device: the yolk acts as a dry binder and softens a strongly flavoured ingredient, the same logic behind deviled eggs and the potted fish pastes sold in jars at the time.