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Sardine Butter
Remove the skins and bones from seven or eight sardines, put the fish in a mortar and pound it until smooth. Boil two large handfuls of parsley until tender, then squeeze it as dry as possible, remove all the stalks or stems, and chop it. Put the parsley in the mortar with the sardines and four ounces of butter and pound again. When well incorporated mould the butter into shapes and keep it on ice until the time of serving. The above is excellent spread on hot toast.
A compound butter of the classic hotel type: pounded fish, blanched herb, softened butter, chilled hard and cut for service. The whole thing takes ten minutes once the butter is soft.
- Butter quantity and temperatureFour ounces is one American stick, half a cup. Let it come to cool room temperature before pounding; cold butter will not take the fish evenly and warm butter will separate into a greasy paste.
- The sardinesSeven or eight sardines most likely means the oil-packed tinned fish, though cooked fresh ones are not ruled out; at modern tin sizes (about 3.75 oz, holding three to five fish) that is one or two tins. Drain them, lift out the spine and the larger fins, and blot; excess packing oil will loosen the butter.
- Blanch, don't boilThe recipe says boil the parsley until tender, but a short blanch, 30-60 seconds in salted water and then straight into cold water, gives a better result. This sets the green and kills the raw bite. Longer and it turns olive-drab and tastes of hay.
- Squeeze it genuinely dryThis is the hinge. Water left in the parsley will bead out of the butter as it chills and the shapes will weep. Wring the blanched parsley in a towel until no more liquid comes.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but pulse rather than run it; over-working warms and breaks the butter. For a smoother result, pass the pounded mixture through a fine sieve as the old kitchens did.
- SeasoningOscar gives none, assuming the sardines carry the salt. Taste before moulding: a squeeze of lemon and a turn of pepper are usual and cayenne is period-correct.
- Moulding and "on ice"Roll into a cylinder in parchment and refrigerate at least two hours, then cut coins; or press into small moulds. Refrigeration replaces the ice box. It keeps a few days covered, and can be frozen.
- YieldAround a cup, enough for eight to ten canapes or to finish four or five pieces of grilled fish.
Compound butters were standing equipment in a late-nineteenth-century hotel kitchen: a rank of them held on ice, each ready to be sliced onto a grilled steak or spread for a savoury, and Escoffier's contemporaries codified dozens under names like beurre d'anchois, beurre de Montpellier and beurre maître d'hôtel. Sardine butter belongs to the anchovy-butter family and reflects how thoroughly the tinned sardine had entered fine dining by the 1890s; Brittany had long been canning them in oil at industrial scale, with a Portuguese industry that began in the 1880s and only scaled up around the turn of the century, and the tins were a staple of American larders, hotel and domestic alike. At the Waldorf it would presumably have gone out on toast fingers as a savoury or a supper-room bite, the sort of small salt thing served late in the evening when the dining room proper had closed.