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Stuffed Anchovies
Split open some anchovies, wash them well in white wine and bone them. Mince a little cooked fish of any kind, place in a basin with very fine breadcrumbs, and make it into a paste by adding yolk of eggs. Stuff the anchovies with this mixture, dip into frying batter, plunge into a fryingpan of boiling fat and fry to a light color. Take out when done, drain and arrange on the dish, and serve with a garnish of fried parsley.
A hors d'oeuvre built on whole salt-cured anchovies, not the slim oil-packed fillets in a modern tin. Sourcing the right fish is most of the work.
- Get whole salted anchoviesThe instruction to split and bone the fish points to whole salt-cured anchovies rather than the ready-boned oil-packed fillets, which are in any case too small and soft to stuff; look for salt-packed whole anchovies at an Italian or Middle Eastern grocer, or substitute fresh sardines or small fresh anchovies if you can find them.
- The white wine wash is desaltingThe white wine wash is probably desalting -- Salt-cured anchovies carry a great deal of salt, and a wash in wine would draw some of it out as well as tempering the cure. A rinse in cold water first and a soak in white wine are both worth doing; taste one before you decide the stuffing needs any salt at all.
- BoningOpen the fish along the belly and lift the backbone out from the head end; the pin bones in a fish this small are soft enough to leave. Keep each fish in one piece so it will hold the filling.
- "Cooked fish of any kind"This is a recipe built on something already cooked, as many entries in the book are. Any flaked cooked white fish or salmon works. Reckon on roughly equal volumes of fish and fine dry breadcrumbs, adding yolk only until the mixture just coheres.
- Frying batterOscar means a plain flour-and-liquid coating batter, not a modern tempura. A cup of flour, a pinch of salt and enough beer, milk or water to make a batter that coats the back of a spoon will do; letting it rest half an hour keeps it from shrinking off the fish.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not really boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously the moment the battered fish goes in, which in modern terms is somewhere around 350-360F. Fry only until pale gold, as the instruction says a light color. The filling is made from already-cooked fish, so you are chiefly setting the batter.
- Fried parsleyDry the sprigs thoroughly, then drop them into the same fat for 10-15 seconds until they stop sputtering and turn dark green. Wet parsley will spit violently in hot fat, so blot it well first.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Three or four stuffed fish per person makes a first course; a dozen anchovies will serve three or four.
Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria, and his 1896 Cook Book is essentially a working record of a large hotel kitchen, which is why so many of its entries begin with something already cooked. Stuffed and fried anchovies belong to the long European tradition of the salted anchovy as an appetite-opener, a fish preserved in salt since antiquity and traded across the Mediterranean in barrels; the technique of splitting, boning and stuffing small fish with a forcemeat is standard French practice of the period. The persil frit garnish was ubiquitous in the restaurant cooking of the 1890s, added to nearly any fried dish on its way out of the kitchen, and it has since largely disappeared from menus.