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Sardines with Anchovy Sauce
Drain twelve sardines and cook in a chafing-dish until Remove from chafing -dish. heated, turning frequently.
Make one cup Brown Sauce with one and one-half tablespoons sardine oil, two tablespoons flour, and one cup Brown Stock. Season with anchovy sauce. Reheat sardines in sauce. Serve with Brown Bread Sandwiches , having a slice of cucumber marinated with French Dressing between slices of bread.
A quick chafing-dish savoury built on the oil the sardines were packed in. It works on a stovetop just as well as over a spirit lamp, and stands or falls on the roux.
- The hinge: cook the rouxSardine oil and flour need a good two to three minutes over moderate heat before the stock goes in, until the paste smells nutty and turns the colour of weak coffee. Under-cooked, the sauce tastes of raw flour and the fish oil turns rank.
- Brown Sauce, in this bookThe reference is to a cross-referenced roux sauce: fat and flour cooked together until browned, then whisked smooth with hot stock and simmered until it coats a spoon. Here the fat is sardine oil rather than butter, which makes it assertive; a little butter alongside softens it.
- Brown StockOriginally a long-simmered beef-and-bone stock. Unsalted beef stock is the closest supermarket equivalent; season at the end, since anchovy sauce is already salty.
- Anchovy sauceA thin bottled condiment of anchovy, vinegar and spice, once a pantry staple. Worcestershire is related but sweeter and more tamarind-forward. Anchovy paste thinned with a spoonful of vinegar or lemon juice is nearer the mark; start with half a teaspoon and taste.
- Handle the fish gentlyTwelve sardines want only a minute or two per side to heat through, and "turning frequently" is optimistic once they are warm. Lift them out with a spatula, build the sauce in the same pan, then slide them back for the final reheat so they arrive whole rather than as paste.
- Sardines to buyTwo or three tins of oil-packed sardines, depending on the size of the fish, will give twelve sardines and more than the tablespoon and a half of oil the sauce needs. Water-packed tins leave you without the sardine oil the sauce is built on; olive oil is the fallback.
- YieldThree sardines and a few spoonfuls of sauce per person: four servings as a savoury or light supper, two as a main.
- The sandwichesCucumber sliced thin, tossed with oil-and-vinegar French dressing and drained before it goes between the slices of brown bread, or the bread turns sodden within minutes of assembly.
Chafing-dish cookery was at its height when this book appeared, a fashion for cooking at the table over a spirit lamp that suited late suppers, bachelor lodgings and the sort of hostess who wanted to perform rather than disappear into a kitchen. The dishes in the section are chosen accordingly: everything comes out of a tin, a jar or a jug of prepared sauce, and nothing needs an oven. Tinned sardines and bottled anchovy sauce were both cheap, keepable and intensely savoury, which is exactly what a cook working with one pan and no larder needed. Serving the fish with a brown-bread-and-cucumber sandwich rather than plain toast is a period touch, and reflects the Anglo-American taste for a salty savoury course paired with something cool and vinegary.