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Fish Sandwiches
Anchovies, sardines, or freshly boiled fish may be used for sandwiches. These are better pounded to a paste, with a few drops of lemon-juice added during the pounding. Fresh white fish, like cod, may be seasoned with salt and pepper, moistened with a little mayonnaise or even a plain white sauce, and then put between two layers of buttered white bread.
A method rather than a formula: the original assumes you know how much fish fills a sandwich and leaves the rest to judgment. A few decisions are worth making deliberately.
- The hinge: dry the fish firstAnything moist enough to pound into a paste will soak into bread within minutes. Drain tinned fish thoroughly, press boiled fish in a clean towel, and butter the bread right to the edges so the fat forms a barrier.
- Pounding, in practiceA mortar was the assumed tool. A food processor will do it in seconds but overworks the fish into a gummy purée; short pulses, or a fork against the side of a bowl, give the coarser texture the original had in mind.
- Anchovies and saltAnchovies are far saltier than most palates now expect. Rinse and soak salt-packed fillets, drain oil-packed ones, and add no further salt; two fillets per sandwich is about the point at which the filling starts to read purely as anchovy.
- SardinesTinned sardines of the period were often skin-on and bone-in, and the soft bones were pounded straight in. They are edible and worth keeping for the calcium, but remove the central spine if the texture bothers you.
- "Freshly boiled fish"Poached is the modern reading: cod or haddock brought to a bare simmer in salted water for 6 to 8 minutes, until it flakes, then cooled completely. Warm fish will melt the butter and the mayonnaise both.
- Plain white sauceA bechamel of butter and flour cooked out and let down with milk, then cooled to room temperature; make it thick enough to bind rather than a pouring sauce. The recipe offers it as an alternative to mayonnaise, and it does firm up when chilled, which suits a packed sandwich.
- QuantityFigure about 1/3 cup of paste, roughly 3 oz, per round of sandwiches; two small tins of sardines or anchovies will stretch to two or three rounds.
- Holding timeFish fillings should be kept cold and eaten the day they are made. If they are going into a lunch basket, keep them chilled rather than at room temperature for hours.
Fish paste sandwiches belong to the era of tinned fish, when anchovies and sardines were among the few reliably shelf-stable savory proteins in an ordinary pantry and appeared often in Anglo-American cookery as relishes, canapes and "savouries" at the close of a meal. The pounding to a paste, with lemon juice worked in as it goes, is the older technique of the mortar-made potted fish, of the kind sold commercially as anchovy paste and bloater paste and reproduced at home. The book treats sandwiches as a category to be systematized rather than a single dish, which is why this entry reads as a set of substitutions: whatever fish is at hand, bound with whatever moistener the household keeps. White sauce appears here as an alternative to mayonnaise, which at the time meant a hand-beaten emulsion made fresh.