Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Broiled Sardines
Broiled Sardines
Select a dozen good-sized, firm sardines, place them in a double broiler and broil for two minutes on each side over a very brisk fire. Place six pieces of toast on a hot dish, lay the sardines on, being careful not to break them, pour over one-half gill of maitre d'hotel butter, garnish with half a dozen quarters of lemon and serve.
A late-Victorian savoury that takes five minutes and depends entirely on handling the fish gently. The sardines Oscar means are the oil-packed tinned ones that arrived from France by the case, not fresh whole fish.
- The hingeDrain the sardines well and blot them, then leave them alone once they are under the heat. Two minutes a side is enough to blister the skin and warm them through; longer and they dry out and fall apart when lifted.
- "Double broiler"A hinged wire basket that closes over the fish so both sides can be turned at once without touching them. A fish grilling basket does the same job; failing that, lay them on a foil-lined sheet under a preheated overhead broiler and skip the turn.
- "A very brisk fire"Full heat, close to the element or coals. In a modern kitchen that means a broiler preheated for ten minutes with the rack in the top position.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is about 1/4 cup, or 2 ounces of compound butter for a dozen sardines.
- Maitre d'hotel butterSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Oscar assumed it was already made up in the larder; make it ahead and keep it cold, then let it melt over the hot fish rather than melting it in a pan.
- Choosing the tinChoosing the fish -- the recipe does not specify fresh or tinned. If you are working from tins, look for large sardines packed in olive oil, skin-on and bone-in, which hold their shape; small brisling or skinless fillets in water will collapse in the basket.
- YieldSix pieces of toast and a dozen sardines means two fish per person and six servings as a savoury or first course. As a light lunch, count on three or four fish each.
- ToastCut it thick and toast it just before serving; it has to be hot and dry enough to take the melted butter without going limp under the fish.
Sardines on toast belonged to the tail end of a formal Victorian and Edwardian dinner, the small hot savoury served after the sweet and before dessert, alongside anchovy toasts, devilled bones and Welsh rarebit. The dish existed at all because of the French canning industry: sardines packed in oil at Nantes and along the Brittany coast were among the first mass-market tinned foods, and by the 1890s tins of them were a fixture in American pantries and hotel larders. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the dining rooms at the Waldorf from its opening in 1893, collected exactly this sort of quick, chafing-dish-scale preparation for The Cook Book (1896). Maitre d'hotel butter, parsley and lemon worked into butter, is often said to have been the usual hotel finish for grilled dishes, and its presence here is the whole difference between a tin of fish and a course on the menu.