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Anchovy Butter
Yolks of 4 hard-cooked eggs ½ cup butter 4 boned anchovies
Paprika
Rub the yolks of the hard-cooked eggs to a smooth paste with the anchovies and butter and add paprika to taste.
A compound butter for sandwiches, made in the days before food processors. The only real difficulty is texture: everything must be at the same softness or the paste stays lumpy.
- Temperature is the hingeHave the butter genuinely soft — an hour at room temperature, not melted — and the egg yolks still slightly warm if possible. Cold butter against dry yolk gives a grainy paste no amount of working will smooth.
- "Boned anchovies"Salt-packed fish, split and the spine removed; note that one boned anchovy yields two fillets, so the recipe may intend as many as eight modern fillets. Oil-packed fillets in a tin or jar are already boned; drain them and blot the oil, or the butter will loosen. Reckon on roughly 15 g for four fillets, double that if you read it as four whole fish.
- SaltAnchovies vary enormously in saltiness. Use unsalted butter and taste before adding anything; if you are working from salt-packed fish, rinse and soak it briefly first.
- PaprikaIn books of this period paprika generally meant the sweet Hungarian sort, used as much for colour as for heat, though Spanish paprika was also on sale. A quarter teaspoon tints the butter a pale coral. Smoked paprika, long made in Spain but a late arrival in Anglophone kitchens, will dominate.
- MethodA sieve is the traditional shortcut — press the yolks through it, mash the anchovies to a paste separately with the flat of a knife, then beat both into the butter. A small food processor does the whole job in twenty seconds.
- Yield and keepingAbout two-thirds of a cup, enough for eight to ten thin sandwiches. Because it contains cooked egg it is not a keeping butter: refrigerate and use within two days.
- Beyond sandwichesRolled in parchment and chilled, it slices into rounds for grilled steak, white fish or hot toast.
Compound butters were a mainstay of the Edwardian sandwich, which was expected to be thin, crustless and served in quantity at teas, receptions and card parties — a filling spread edge to edge, rather than a stack of ingredients. Anchovies had long been a British and American storecupboard staple, arriving salted in barrels from the Mediterranean and valued, along with ketchups and essences, for the savoury depth we would now call umami. Paprika appears here as a fashionable touch: it entered American cookbooks in force around the turn of the century, largely through Hungarian imports, and it is often said to have been favoured because it coloured a pale mixture attractively without making it fiery. The Butterick company, better known for dress patterns, published this book as part of a broad move into domestic advice for the middle-class housekeeper who had fewer servants than her mother and more entertaining to do.