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Anchovies with Olives
Thoroughly wash and cut off the fillets of some anchovies, and chop them up very fine with a little parsley and onion; put the whole into a mortar and pound it well, adding a little cayenne for seasoning. Cut a number of Spanish olives in halves, take out the stones, and fill them with the pounded anchovy mixture. In the meantime cut some small rounds of bread about an inch in thickness and an inch and a half in diameter, scrape out a little from the center of each, put them into a fryingpan with butter, and fry to a nice light golden color; then take out and drain, and arrange on a napkin spread over a dish; put an olive in each, serve with a little mayonnaise sauce poured over and around the foot of the croutons of fried bread.
Baked Bass, Plain Scale, wash and thoroughly clean a bass, leaving the head intact, if to be sent to table whole; then make a stuffing of two cupfuls of breadcrumbs, one teacupful of butter, the rind of a quarter of a lemon minced fine, and two or three sprigs of parsley, green thyme and marjoram. Season this mixture with pepper and salt. Beat up a couple of eggs, a very little water, and mix the stuffing with it. Fill into the fish and sew up when stuffed. Score both sides with a sharp knife by cutting down to the bone, and put a slice of salt pork, cut thin, into each incision; then bake in a pan and baste with stock and seasoning. Place a little tomato puree or tomato sauce into the pan with the gravy, after removing the fish, and allow it to come to a boil; then skim and strain and serve in a tureen with the fish. Care should be taken not to break the fish when transferring it from the pan to the dish. Some consider a glass of white wine added to each half pint of sauce an improvement.
Two separate items run together in the original text: an anchovy-stuffed olive canapé and a whole baked bass. The paragraph break was lost in printing, and "Baked Bass, Plain Scale" should read "Baked Bass, Plain. Scale, wash..."
- Anchovies then and nowThe instruction to wash and fillet suggests whole salt-packed anchovies rather than prepared fillets. Salt-packed anchovies still exist and need a soak and a rinse; if you use tinned fillets in oil, blot them, skip the washing, and taste before adding further salt.
- The mortarA small food processor does the work in seconds, but pulse rather than run it — the mixture should be a coarse paste stiff enough to hold in an olive cavity, not a purée that slumps out.
- Spanish olivesThese are the large brine-cured green Spanish olives, sold pitted today. Buying them pitted saves the stoning step, though halved olives sit more steadily in a hollowed crouton than whole ones.
- The croutonsAn inch thick and an inch and a half across gives a squat cylinder, not a thin round; scraping out the center makes a cup for the olive. Cut them from a firm, close-crumbed loaf a day old, or they will soak up butter and collapse in the pan.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no yield or number of croutons. Fry them shortly before serving rather than in advance, as they soften and toughen on standing.
- A teacupful of butterTeacup measures in American books of this period were not standardised, reckoned anywhere from a gill (4 fl oz) to about 6 fl oz (three-quarters of a modern cup). At any of those readings this is a very rich stuffing by modern taste; half the butter binds the crumbs perfectly well with the eggs.
- Oven and donenessNo temperature is given. Bake a stuffed whole fish at 375-400°F, allowing roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the shoulder, and take it out when the flesh at the backbone flakes; because the stuffing is bound with raw egg, the stuffing as well as the fish must reach a safe temperature (145°F).
- Larding with salt porkThe scoring and salt pork are there to baste a lean fish from inside the cuts. Blanch the pork slices briefly first if yours is heavily cured, or the fish will come out aggressively salty, and season the stuffing lightly to compensate.
- Sewing upKitchen twine and a trussing needle still do this best, but two or three short metal skewers laced across the belly are easier to remove at the table without tearing the fish.
- The fish itself'Bass' in a New York kitchen of this period could mean striped bass or black sea bass, both landed in local waters. Wild striped bass is now managed and in some places cannot be sold commercially; farmed hybrid striped bass, black sea bass or a whole branzino scaled up all take this treatment.
- The pan sauceLift the fish out first, as the recipe insists, then add the tomato purée to the pan drippings, boil, skim and strain. The optional glass of white wine per half pint should go in with the tomato and be reduced, not stirred in at the end.
Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, not a cook by trade, and his 1896 book appeared during the years when French service and the multi-course dinner were at their peak in New York, though how closely it reflects what the hotel's kitchens actually sent out is disputed. Anchovy-stuffed olives on fried bread belong squarely to that moment: a savory bite designed for the beginning of a long menu, when the fashion was for small, salty, highly seasoned mouthfuls to open the appetite, and the technique — pound in a mortar, hollow a crouton, mask with mayonnaise — is straight out of the classic hors d'oeuvre repertoire. The baked bass that follows shows the other face of the book, an unfussy American treatment of a fish familiar in the city's markets; larding a lean fish with salt pork through scored cuts is an old technique that long predates either recipe, and the tomato sauce finished in the roasting pan is simply thrift dressed up for a tureen.