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Anchovy Sandwiches
Empty a bottle of anchovies into a bowl of water, and wash them thoroughly, changing the water frequently. Put them, when drained and boned, into a mortar with an equal quantity of butter, and pound well to a very smooth paste. Spread this over thin slices of bread, put two of those together to form the sandwich, and serve.
A tea-sandwich filling that assumes salt-packed whole anchovies. Almost all the labor in the original disappears if you buy the modern equivalent, but the proportions and the bread still need attention.
- The anchovies have changedA "bottle of anchovies" in this period meant whole fish packed in dry salt or brine, head and backbone intact, which is why the recipe calls for repeated washing and boning. Modern oil-packed fillets are already boned and far less salty: drain them, blot the oil, and skip the soaking entirely. If you buy true salt-packed anchovies, 20 to 30 minutes in several changes of cold water is enough.
- QuantityThe recipe gives no weights. A standard 2 oz tin yields about 1½ oz of drained fillets, which with an equal weight of butter makes enough for roughly 8 to 10 thin sandwiches, cut into fingers.
- Equal quantity of butterOne-to-one by weight is a genuinely strong, salty paste, correct for very thin bread served with drinks. If you are spreading it thickly or using salt-packed fish, two parts butter to one part anchovy is more manageable.
- Mortar workA small food processor does this in 30 seconds; a fork and a bowl work nearly as well. The butter must be properly soft — cool butter will not emulsify with the fish and the paste stays grainy and streaked.
- SeasoningAdd no salt. A squeeze of lemon, a scrape of cayenne and a grind of black pepper are the traditional corrections and keep the paste from tasting flatly briny.
- The breadThin means thin: a day-old tight-crumbed white loaf sliced about ⅛ inch, crusts trimmed after assembly. Fresh soft bread tears under a stiff paste, so chill the loaf or let it sit out a day before slicing.
- Make aheadThe paste keeps a week refrigerated, sealed, and improves after a day. Assembled sandwiches should be made within a couple of hours and kept covered with a damp cloth, as the butter-bound paste will dampen the crumb over time.
Anchovy butter belongs to a large family of Victorian and Edwardian savory pastes — potted shrimp, bloater paste, Gentleman's Relish — that let a household keep an intensely salty fish preserve on hand and deploy it on toast or thin bread at a moment's notice. Oscar Tschirky was compiling this book at the Waldorf around the turn of the century, when such sandwiches were standard at afternoon tea, at card parties and on the free-lunch counters and bar spreads of hotels, where salty food was said to encourage drink orders. The insistence on washing the fish through several waters is the tell that these were dry-salted anchovies from the Mediterranean, shipped in bulk and rebottled; oil-packed boneless fillets in flat tins became the common retail form later, which is why the step now reads as unnecessary labor.