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Toasted Sardine Sandwiches
Cut thin slices of white bread into squares, triangles, or rounds. Remove bones and skin from sardines, add lemon-juice and a dash of cayenne to the fish. Spread bread lightly with butter, then with the sardine mixture and toast a delicate brown. Serve very hot. A good dish for Sunday night supper.
A canapé-scale recipe with no quantities at all, which is typical of chafing-dish and supper cookery of the period. The one thing to get right is the toasting: the sardine paste is on top, exposed, and it burns before the bread colours.
- Quantities to work fromOne standard 3.75 oz tin of sardines, mashed with a teaspoon of lemon juice and a pinch of cayenne, will cover about 12 to 16 small shapes. Figure three or four per person as a supper dish, more as an appetiser.
- Toast under a broiler, not in a toasterThe original does not say what heat source to use. A broiler about 5 inches from the element for 2 to 3 minutes, or a 425F oven for 6 to 8 minutes, will do it, watching constantly. The fish paste should sizzle and speckle, not blacken.
- Toast one side firstUntoasted bread spread with butter and fish goes soggy underneath. Toast the bare side, then turn, butter, spread and finish under the heat. The result holds up on a plate.
- "Delicate brown" means the breadJudge doneness by the edges of the bread, which brown fast on thin slices. The sardines are already cooked in the tin and need only to heat through.
- Sardines have changedTinned sardines around 1900 were generally packed in oil (French sardine or pilchard, with Norwegian brisling increasingly common), and the recipe's 'remove bones and skin' assumes you will pull the backbone out by hand. Modern boneless skinless fillets skip that step. Drain them well or the paste will be loose; oil-packed gives more flavour than water-packed.
- "Spread bread lightly with butter"Light really is the instruction here. The sardine oil supplies plenty of fat, and heavy butter under a broiler will pool and drip.
- ServingThese collapse into limpness within minutes of leaving the heat, which is why the original says serve very hot. Toast them in batches while people are at the table rather than holding them warm.
Tinned sardines turn up constantly in cookery books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, almost as a pantry staple. Sardine toast, sardines on toast and sardine sandwiches appear repeatedly in this period's supper menus, and the note that it is "a good dish for Sunday night supper" fits that pattern: in middle-class households with servants, Sunday evening was commonly the cook's time off, and the meal was expected to be cold, light, or made quickly by the family from things already in the house. Cayenne and lemon with oily tinned fish is a common Anglo-American treatment of the era, close relative of the anchovy and devilled savouries that ended a formal Victorian dinner.