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Bouchees of Sardines
Pound one or two boned sardines in a mortar, together with a small quantity of cheese, and add salt, pepper and chili vinegar until the mixture has the taste and appearance of dressed crab. Mix in a few chopped oysters; put the mixture into small cases of bread fried in butter. and garnish with hard boiled yolk of egg rubbed through a sieve and mixed with finely-chopped parsley. Arrange these bouchees on a napkin on a dish, and serve.
A savoury from the era when small hot bites closed a meal rather than opened it. The recipe is proportion-free, so taste as you build.
- Bouchée casesHere the "small cases" are bread, not pastry: cut rounds or squares of firm white bread about 1½ inches across, hollow the centres slightly, and fry in butter until crisp on all sides. They must be properly dry and browned or the sardine paste will soften them within minutes.
- The oystersChopped raw oysters folded into a cold paste and served without cooking is the one point to reconsider. Either poach them briefly first and chop them cold, or leave them out; the sardine and cheese carry the dish on their own.
- Chili vinegarA Victorian condiment of vinegar steeped with red chillies, sold bottled and now uncommon. A teaspoon of cider vinegar with a few drops of hot sauce, or vinegar from a jar of pickled chillies, gives a similar sharp heat.
- The cheeseUnspecified. A dry hard cheese for salt and body suits the paste: grated Parmesan or a well-aged Cheddar, roughly a tablespoon to two sardines.
- "Dressed crab" as the targetThat phrase is the actual instruction: a spreadable, well-seasoned paste, not a crumbly mash and not a purée. Work it in a mortar or a small food processor and stop while it still holds a shape on a spoon.
- Mimosa garnishHard-boiled yolk pushed through a fine sieve, here tossed with chopped parsley, is close to the garnish known as mimosa. Sieve the yolk while just warm and scatter it dry at the last moment; it clumps if it sits on damp filling.
- Yield and timingTwo sardines will fill roughly eight to ten small cases, enough for four as a savoury or a canapé course. Fill and garnish immediately before serving. Fried items were conventionally sent to table on a folded napkin, which would also absorb butter.
Oscar Tschirky's book catalogues the Waldorf's repertoire at the turn of the twentieth century, when the small savoury still had a fixed place in Anglo-American formal dining, served after the sweet. Bouchee is simply French for "mouthful," and here the pastry case of that name is replaced by fried bread. Tinned sardines were a staple of this genre: cheap, intensely flavoured, and by the 1890s canned in quantity in Brittany, Portugal and Maine. Comparing the paste to dressed crab, as the recipe does, assumes a reader who knows what dressed crab tastes like.