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Sardines and Anchovy Toast
Clean well three anchovies, put them into a mortar with one teaspoonful of anchovy paste, one ounce of butter and a seasoning of cayenne pepper and grated nutmeg and pound them to a smooth paste, then pass it through a fine hair sieve. Toast some thin slices of bread and cut them into pieces about the breadth and length of a sardine. Wash some sardines in hot water, wipe them dry, divide into fillets by splitting them down the back and take the bone out. Spread the pounded anchovy on the toast and lay a filleted sardine on top of each piece. Pile the pieces of toast on a dish in couples, crossing one another like lattice work and garnish the dish with chopped hard-boiled eggs.
A savoury from the era when a salt-fish toast closed the meal rather than opened it. Nothing here is difficult, but the ingredients have shifted since 1896.
- Salt anchovies"Clean well three anchovies" most likely means whole salt- or brine-packed anchovies, which want rinsing and a soak to draw off surface salt, then filleting and boning. Oil-packed fillets from a tin work as a substitute; use six to eight and skip the soaking.
- Anchovy pasteStill sold in tubes, and still essentially the same product: pounded anchovy, salt and a little spice. A teaspoon is enough to carry the flavour with the whole fish doing the rest.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in seconds. The hair sieve step would have caught stray bone and skin from the salt fish, as well as smoothing the paste; if you use tinned fillets it is unnecessary, and you can simply mash everything with a fork.
- Butter proportionOne ounce is two tablespoons, and it should be properly soft before pounding or the paste will separate rather than emulsify. Cold butter and salt fish will not come together smoothly.
- Washing the sardinesThe hot-water rinse removes the packing oil. Modern sardines in good olive oil need only draining and a blot on a paper towel.
- ToastCut the bread to sardine size before toasting, or the crisp edges shatter under the knife. Thin slices, well browned and cooled, hold up to the wet paste; soft toast goes limp within minutes.
- Assemble at the last momentThis is the hinge. Paste on warm toast with oily fish above it turns soggy fast, so spread and top only when the dish is going to the table.
- YieldThree anchovies and a tin of sardines gives roughly eight to twelve small toasts, enough for three or four people as an appetiser or savoury.
Oscar Tschirky's book belongs to the last decades of the English-style savoury course, a small hot salty dish served after the sweet to finish the wine, and anchovy in some form was a frequent ingredient. Anchovy toast, anchovy butter and the various "Scotch woodcock" and "devilled" preparations all rest on the same idea: a cured fish pounded with butter and spice, spread thin, and put on something crisp. Sardines arrived in this company through the tin, which by the 1890s had made imported French and Portuguese sardines a familiar pantry item in New York. The lattice-work stacking and the border of chopped hard-boiled egg are typical of the period's hotel presentation: the food is simple, the presentation is not.