Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Sardine Toast
Sardine Toast
Scrape the skin off some sardines, split them in halves, lengthwise and remove the bones. Lay the sardines on a plate, pour some of their oil over them, cover with another plate and place them in a moderate oven until heated all through. Cut the required number of slices about three-fourths of an inch thick off a stale square loaf, toast them to a delicate brown on both sides and butter them. Cut the toast into fingers and lay a sardine on each; dust them over lightly with salt and a very small quantity of cayenne pepper, and squeeze some lemon juice over them. Spread a folded napkin or an ornamental dish-paper over a hot dish, arrange the fingers of toast neatly on it, garnish with a border of nicely picked and washed watercress, and serve. The above makes a very tasty breakfast dish and is very quickly prepared.
A savoury of the sort that filled out hotel breakfast and supper menus around 1900. Nothing here is difficult; the details that matter are the bread and the gentleness of the heating.
- Moderate ovenThe original gives no temperature; "moderate" in period usage is generally read as somewhere around 325-350F. The sardines are only being warmed through between two plates, so a few minutes is enough; they are already cooked and will fall apart if they sit.
- Skinning sardinesModern canned sardines are often sold skinless and boneless, which removes the first two steps. If yours are whole, the skin scrapes off easily with the back of a knife and the backbone lifts out in one piece.
- Stale square loafA day-old sandwich loaf with a tight crumb. Fresh bread steams rather than toasts and will go limp under the oil and lemon; a firm white or pain de mie is what Oscar means.
- ThicknessThree-quarters of an inch is deliberately thick for toast — it holds the sardine and the juices without collapsing. Cut fingers roughly the length of a whole sardine half, about three per slice.
- Cayenne"A very small quantity" is accurate; a pinch across the whole dish. The point is a faint heat behind the lemon, not a discernible spice.
- Assemble at the last minuteToast, sardine, salt, cayenne, lemon, serve. Held even a few minutes the oil soaks through and the toast loses its edge, which is why the original insists on a hot dish.
- YieldTwo slices cut into three fingers each makes six; a tin of sardines will usually give more halves than that. Six fingers is enough for two people as a breakfast dish or four as a savoury with drinks.
- The napkinThe folded napkin or dish-paper is a presentation convention of the period, though it will also catch stray oil and keep the fingers from sliding. A paper doily or a small sheet of parchment on a warmed plate does the same work.
Sardine toast belongs to the Anglo-American "savoury" tradition — small hot things on toast, anchovy, marrow, cheese, roe — which crossed easily into hotel breakfast service because it could be built to order in a minute or two. Canned sardines made it possible: French packers in Nantes and along the Brittany coast had been sealing sardines in oil since the 1820s, and by the 1890s tinned sardines were a staple of the American grocery. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, put his name to an 1896 book whose provenance is contested — much of it appears to derive from existing printed cookbooks rather than Waldorf kitchen practice — and dishes like this one show what that meant in practice: a few cheap tinned ingredients, exact instructions about the bread, and a good deal of attention to how the plate looked when it left the kitchen. The watercress border and the folded napkin are as much a part of the recipe as the fish.