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Fish Sandwiches
Anchovy, sardines, or fresh 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 nicely seasoned with salt and pepper, moistened with a little mayonnaise or even a plain white sauce, and then put between two layers of white bread, nicely buttered.
A method rather than a formula: the book assumes you know what a sandwich looks like and only tells you how to treat the fish. A few decisions are left to the cook that are worth making deliberately.
- Pounding, in practiceA mortar was the standard tool in 1911; a small food processor does the same work in seconds, though a fork against the side of a bowl gives a better texture for sardines. Stop while the paste still has some grain to it — fully smooth fish paste reads as pâté, not sandwich filling.
- Anchovy quantitiesAnchovy here most likely means the salt-cured or tinned fillets, far saltier than the fresh boiled fish alternative, though the recipe does not say. Four or five fillets pounded with two tablespoons of softened butter — an enrichment the recipe itself does not call for — will fill two sandwiches; add no salt at all.
- SardinesTinned sardines of the period were usually oil-packed whole small fish, bones and all. Drain them well before pounding or the bread turns sodden within minutes; the soft bones mash in without notice and are worth keeping.
- "Fresh boiled fish"Cod, haddock or any lean white fish, poached and cooled. Flake it and check carefully for pin bones.
- The plain white sauceA thick béchamel, cooled to spreading consistency, not a pouring sauce. Use roughly a tablespoon per cup of flaked fish; more and the filling slides out of the bread.
- Butter both slicesNot a nicety. Butter seals the crumb against moisture from the fish and the mayonnaise, which is the difference between a sandwich that holds for an hour and one that collapses. Have it properly soft before spreading.
- Keeping and servingFish fillings warm quickly and turn assertive; make these no more than a few hours ahead and keep them refrigerated, wrapped, until serving. For tea sandwiches, crusts off and cut into three fingers or four triangles gives six to eight pieces from four slices.
Fish paste sandwiches belong to the late-Victorian and Edwardian tea table, when tinned anchovy and sardine had become cheap enough for ordinary households and pounded savoury pastes — anchovy, potted shrimp, bloater — were a fixture of the pantry shelf. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, aimed its cook book at the same middle-class housekeeper it sold sewing patterns to, and a sandwich chapter of this kind is a sign of the period's growing appetite for the picnic, the luncheon box and the afternoon call. The instruction to use up "fresh boiled fish" is the older thrift showing through: this is a way to move yesterday's poached cod, dressed with mayonnaise, onto a plate that looks intentional.