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To Serve Anchovies
They must be thoroughly cleaned, boned and trimmed. To open, they should be soaked in cold water for a couple of hours, taken out and dried on a cloth, and the backs divided by the points of the two thumbs, rather than with a knife, which should never touch them unless it is electro-plated or of silver. Lay the halves neatly on a dish, and garnish with finely chopped white of egg and parsley; pour salad oil over all.
This is a method for dressing whole salt-cured anchovies as an hors d'oeuvre, and it assumes a fish still packed in salt with head, bones and fins attached. Almost everything here hinges on what you buy.
- Buy salt-packed, not tinnedThe recipe only makes sense with whole anchovies buried in coarse salt, sold in tins or by weight at Italian grocers. Oil-packed fillets are already boned, trimmed and desalted, and need none of this treatment beyond draining.
- The two-hour soakCold water for two hours draws out the curing salt; change the water two or three times. Some modern cooks use milk instead, and very salty fish may want longer. Taste a scrap before you commit the batch.
- Why no steel knifeCarbon steel of the period reacted with the salt and oils in the fish, leaving a grey metallic taint and discolouring the flesh. Silver and electroplate did not. A modern stainless blade is inert and perfectly safe here, but splitting the fish with the thumbs is still faster and gives a cleaner separation along the backbone.
- BoningPull the head away and the guts follow with it. The recipe has you part the fish along the back with the points of both thumbs rather than opening the belly; the spine then lifts out from the head end in one piece. Trim the tail and any ragged edge.
- Salad oilIn this period the term usually meant olive oil, though cottonseed and other bland oils were also sold as salad oil. Olive oil is the safe reading here; pour it on just before serving so it does not sit and turn heavy.
- The garnishFinely chopped white of hard-boiled egg and parsley. Sieved yolk turns up as a garnish in other dishes of this kind, but the recipe calls for the white only; adding yolk for colour is your choice, not the text's.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Two or three whole fish per person is a reasonable allowance as part of a spread of hors d'oeuvre. Dress them shortly before serving; desalted anchovy softens quickly once wet.
Salt-cured anchovy appears among the opening items on the American hotel menu at the end of the nineteenth century, and Oscar Tschirky's book records the mechanics of that service rather than a dish in the ordinary sense. The horror of steel touching the fish belongs to its moment: table silver and electroplate were universal in dining rooms of this class, while kitchen knives were carbon steel, which stains and taints on contact with acid and salt. Stainless steel was not in commercial cutlery use for another two decades, so the rule was a practical one, not a snobbery. The Mediterranean trade in salted anchovies is very old and the fish reached New York in wooden kegs and tins packed in coarse salt, which is why the first instruction is a long soak rather than a rinse.