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Baked Sardines
Skin a dozen sardines, put them on a dish in the oven, and heat them through. Put the oil from the sardines into a small saucepan, and when it boils mix in one breakfast cupful of water; stir it over the fire until thick, then add one teaspoonful of Worcestershire sauce, and season with salt and cayenne pepper; move the saucepan from the fire, and add the yolk of an egg that has been beaten together with one teaspoonful each of vinegar and mustard. Take the dish of sardines out of the oven, pour the sauce over them and serve while hot.
A late-Victorian hot savoury built entirely from a tin, with a sauce that needs one correction before it will behave.
- The sauce will not thicken as writtenOil and water alone will not "stir until thick", and the only thickener the text supplies is the egg yolk at the end. Whether a flour has dropped out of the printed text is guesswork, but working about a tablespoon of flour into the hot oil and cooking it a minute before adding the liquid will give the sauce the body the instruction implies.
- There is not enough oil in a modern tinThe oil drainable from the tins needed for a dozen sardines falls well short of what a cupful of water needs. Make up the difference with butter so you have roughly equal weights of fat and flour.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, about 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Start at 8 and thin the sauce afterwards if it sets too stiff.
- Oven heatThe recipe names no temperature; the sardines are only being warmed, not cooked. A moderate oven for five or six minutes is ample; longer and they dry out and break up when you lift them.
- SkinningSkinless and boneless tinned sardines are widely available, in which case this step disappears; plenty of tins, though, are still packed with skin and bones. If yours have skins, they slip off easily with the back of a knife once the fish are cold.
- The yolk goes in off the heatBeat the yolk with the vinegar and mustard, then stir a spoonful of the hot sauce into it before returning the lot to the pan. Added straight to a boiling sauce it will scramble.
- SeasoningTinned sardines and Worcestershire are both salty. Season the sauce at the end, and use the cayenne with restraint — a couple of pinches carries a cup of sauce.
- Yield and servingA dozen sardines serves three or four as a savoury or a light lunch. Buttered toast underneath is the usual accompaniment and catches the sauce.
Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel whose name fronted this 1896 volume, was collecting for a American household as much as for the Waldorf's dining rooms, and tinned sardines were exactly the kind of thing an ambitious cook could keep on hand. Sardines packed in oil had become a staple of the American grocery by the later nineteenth century and were prized enough to be sold in decorative keyed tins. The dish itself belongs to the English savoury tradition — a small, hot, sharply seasoned course of anchovy, cheese or fish served at the end of dinner, after the sweet — which American hotels of the period drew on freely. The Worcestershire, mustard, vinegar and cayenne are the standard grammar of that course: everything pungent, nothing sweet.