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Curried Sardines
Mix together one teaspoonful each of sugar and curry powder, one teacupful of cream and a few drops of lemon juice; stir it in a saucepan over the fire until hot, then put in six or eight sardines. When they are thoroughly heated lay them on a hot dish with some fried slices of apple and onion, pour the sauce over, place an edging of boiled rice all round, garnish the tops with capsicums and serve while hot.
A quick chafing-dish supper built on tinned sardines, cream and curry powder. Everything hinges on gentleness: the fish are already cooked and will shred into the sauce if the pan gets to a rolling boil.
- TeacupfulA teacup in this period is usually reckoned at somewhere between 4 and 6 fluid ounces, not the 8 of a modern measuring cup. Something in the region of 3/4 cup of cream will do; the original measure is genuinely approximate, so judge by whether the sauce coats the fish.
- The sardinesTinned sardines in oil, drained, and preferably the larger ones packed whole. Slide them in off the heat or at the barest simmer and give them two or three minutes to warm through — any longer and they break up into a grey mash.
- Curry powderStir the powder into the cream while the pan is still cool and let it come up slowly, or fry it briefly in a little of the sardine oil first. Raw curry powder dumped into hot cream tastes dusty and gritty.
- CreamHeavy cream holds together; single or light cream can split under acid. The original mixes the lemon juice in with the cream from the start; if you are wary of splitting, hold it back and add it at the end, off the heat.
- The sugarOne teaspoon in this quantity is a seasoning, not a sweetener — it rounds off the raw edge of commercial curry powder. It is not optional in the way it looks.
- Fried apple and onionA firm apple, cored and cut in rings about a quarter inch thick, and onion rings the same. Fry them separately in butter until browned; the apple cooks faster and goes to sauce if you crowd it with the onion.
- CapsicumsIn period usage this generally means the larger pepper pods rather than small hot chillies; red ones, often bottled or pickled, cut in strips.
- Rice and yieldPlain boiled long-grain rice, drained dry, banked around the edge of the platter. Six to eight sardines with this much sauce feeds two as a light supper, three at a stretch.
Curried tinned fish was a fixture of the late Victorian supper table on both sides of the Atlantic — cheap, shelf-stable and quick enough for a chafing dish at the sideboard. The curry powder is the Anglo-Indian commercial blend that had been sold ready-mixed in Britain and America since at least the early nineteenth century, and the pairing of it with fried apple and onion belongs to the English Anglo-Indian curry tradition rather than to Indian cooking. Sardines specifically were a fashionable convenience food of the 1890s: French and later Maine canneries had made them ubiquitous, and cookbooks of the decade treat a tin of them the way a modern one treats a can of beans.