No. 772

Anchovies-Sardels—Anchovy Salad and Anchovies with Olives

Anchois et Salade d'Anchois, Anchois aux Olives

Anchovies from Marseilles and Italy are considered very fine, their meat being red and of an exquisite taste, yet, in New York, the white meat anchovies imported from Holland called Sardels are preferred. Wash them well, changing the water frequently, then let them soak; afterward drain and wipe well with a dry cloth to remove the fine white skin covering these fishes, divide them in two lengthwise, remove the middle bone, and pare well the fillets, cut off their ends square, having them all of equal length, and then lay them in small jars and cover over with oil, to use when needed. Drain and arrange them symmetrically on side dishes, and garnish either with parsley, chervil or chopped tarragon, sprinkle over a dash of vinegar and some good oil, garnish with chopped hard boiled eggs, or else quartered eggs and slices of green lemon cut in halves.

Anchovies with Olives.—When the anchovies are prepared as for the above, pare them on one side, and remove a little of the ends, then roll them over a round stick of wood five-eighths of an inch in diameter, so that an olive can be inserted in the center. The olives should be stoned with a small cylindrical cutter, and the empty space filled with hard boiled egg-yolks rubbed through a fine sieve, or else some anchovy butter (No. 569). Range them symmetrically and sprinkle over a little good sweet oil.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a preparation method rather than a cooked dish: the whole point is getting salt-packed anchovies clean, boneless and uniform before they go on the plate. Almost everything that can go wrong happens in the soaking.

Start with salt-packed fishThe recipe assumes whole anchovies cured in dry salt, sold loose from a barrel or in tins, which still exist in Italian and Spanish groceries. Oil-packed fillets in a flat tin are already filleted and desalted, so skip straight to the arranging; they will be softer and saltier-tasting than the original intends.
Sardels'Sardel' is simply a term for anchovy, related to German Sardelle and probably deriving ultimately from Italian sardella; here it means the pale, Dutch-cured fish Ranhofer says New York preferred. There is no separate fish to hunt for.
Soaking timeTwenty to thirty minutes in cold water, with two or three changes, is usually enough for salt anchovies. Taste one; over-soaking leaves them flabby and washes out the cured flavor along with the salt.
Skin and boneThe "fine white skin" slips off under the thumb once the fish is damp, and the backbone lifts out cleanly if you open the fish from the belly side. Wiping dry with a cloth before filleting, as instructed, is what makes this possible.
Green lemon'Green lemon' may stand for the French citron vert, which today means lime; an unripe, thin-skinned lemon is at least as plausible in 1894. Either reads correctly on the plate.
Anchovy butter (No. 569)That cross-reference is anchovy pounded to a paste and worked into softened butter. Pressed through a fine sieve, it pipes into a stoned olive without trouble.
Storing under oilFillets that have been desalted are no longer preserved. Keep the jar refrigerated and use within a few days rather than treating it as a pantry item, and let the oil come back to room temperature before serving so it is not cloudy.
The rolled olivesA 5/8-inch dowel is about the diameter of a large olive; roll the pared fillet around it, slide the dowel out, and the coil holds its shape. Chill the rolls briefly before filling so they do not unwind.
YieldFigure two to three fillets per person as an hors-d'œuvre, or one stuffed olive each on a mixed cold table. A 200 g tin of salt anchovies yields roughly two dozen fillets.

A Little History

Salt-cured anchovies were one of the oldest and most widely traded preserved foods in the Mediterranean, and by the nineteenth century the Provençal and Ligurian coasts and the Dutch curing trade were supplying them across Europe and to American importers. Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's, is writing here for the hors-d'œuvre or cold side-dish course that opened a formal American dinner in the 1890s: a table of small, sharply flavored, almost entirely uncooked things — olives, radishes, sardines, anchovies — arranged for looks as much as for eating, which is why so much of the instruction concerns trimming the fillets to equal length and ranging them symmetrically. The preference he records for the milder white Dutch "sardels" over the redder Marseilles fish is a small piece of evidence about New York palates of the period, and about how much of the city's fine-dining larder arrived by ship in barrels of salt.