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Anchovy Toast
Thoroughly cleanse and fillet the number of anchovies to be used, chop them small, or crush them with a silver knife. Put this into a small stewpan with some salad oil, warm slightly, and set it on one side. Cut some slices of bread, nearly half an inch thick, and trim to an even oblong shape; toast them on both sides on a gridiron, basting with a brush dipped in oil. Spread the anchovy over, and sprinkle on all a little chopped parsley. Push the gridiron with the dressed slices on it into a sharp oven for a few minutes, and serve hot.
A savoury of the sort that closed an Edwardian dinner or arrived with drinks. Nothing here is difficult; the whole thing turns on not overheating the anchovy paste.
- Warm, do not cookThe anchovy and oil want only gentle warming, so the fillets slacken into a paste. Held over real heat the oil is liable to separate and the fish to turn harsh and grainy. Take the pan off before anything sizzles.
- Which anchoviesOscar most likely meant salt-packed anchovies, which need rinsing, filleting and boning — that would be the "cleanse and fillet" step. Oil-packed tinned fillets skip all of it; drain them and use rather less oil, and taste before adding any salt at all.
- Salad oilPeriod shorthand for a mild table oil, in a Waldorf kitchen almost certainly olive. Any decent olive oil works; the quantity is judgment — enough to make a spreadable paste, roughly a teaspoon per six fillets.
- The silver knifeNot affectation. Carbon-steel blades of the day reacted with salt and acid and left a metallic taint on fish. A stainless blade or a small mortar does the job now.
- Sharp ovenA hot oven, roughly 425–450°F. The slices are already toasted, so they want two or three minutes at most — long enough to heat the topping through, not to dry it out.
- Gridiron and grillA gridiron is a flat rack set over coals; the bread is toasted on it and then goes into the oven still sitting on the rack. A wire cooling rack on a sheet pan reproduces this, or toast under a broiler and transfer to the pan.
- The breadHalf an inch of firm white bread, trimmed of crust, is thick enough to stay crisp under an oily paste. Sandwich bread collapses; use a close-crumbed loaf and oil both sides as directed.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Perhaps two anchovy fillets per slice of toast, and two or three slices per person. Serve immediately — they are at their best straight from the oven.
Anchovy toast belongs to the British savoury course, the small hot salty dish served after the sweet and before dessert, and it travelled to American hotel dining rooms with the rest of the late-Victorian menu. Anchovy was the standard vehicle: bottled anchovy paste and Gentleman's Relish were pantry staples in the same decades, and cooks who lacked them made the paste themselves from salt-cured fillets, as here. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 from his post as maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, records that kind of kitchen shorthand throughout — a gridiron, a silver knife, an oven judged "sharp" rather than measured.