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Broiled Sardines on Toast, Devilled Sauce
Have twelve fine, good-sized sardines. Carefully roll them, without breaking, in cracker dust (crumbs). Arrange them on a double broiler and broil on a brisk fire for two minutes on each side, or until of a good colour. Prepare six small toasts; place two sardines on each slice. Arrange them on a large dish. Pour a hot devilled sauce over them and serve.
A five-minute savoury that assumes two things a modern cook may not have: a hinged wire grill and a jar of made devilled sauce. Both are easily replaced.
- "Double broiler"Not a double boiler. It is a hinged wire basket that clamps the fish between two grids so they can be turned in one motion without breaking. A fish grill, a folding hamburger basket, or a well-oiled rack under the oven broiler serves the same purpose.
- Brisk fireLive coals at their hottest, or a well-preheated broiler with the pan close beneath it. Two minutes a side assumes that kind of heat; on a cooler fire the crumbs stay pale and the oil weeps out.
- Which sardines"twelve fine, good-sized" points to large fish rather than the small brisling that dominate shelves now; in a book of this date they are most likely tinned in oil, though the recipe does not say so. Two large fish per toast is the intent, so allow three or four small ones per slice. If using oil-packed fish, drain them well or the crumb coating will not take.
- Cracker dustSoda or water crackers crushed fine, not seasoned breadcrumbs. The recipe calls for no egg or flour wash; oily fish will hold the crumbs without one.
- Devilled sauceThe book assumes the standard sauce of the period: a brown or butter base sharpened with dry mustard, cayenne, and vinegar or Worcestershire. Have it made and hot before the fish go on, since the toasts collapse quickly once dressed.
- The hingeHandling. Sardines break at the belly if lifted with a fork or turned loose on a grate. Roll, clamp, turn once, and slide them off the grid onto the toast rather than lifting them.
- YieldSix slices, so six people as a savoury or first course, or three as a light lunch with a salad.
This is a savoury in the English sense: a small hot, salty, sharply seasoned dish served near the end of a meal, after the sweet. Tinned sardines from Brittany and later Norway and Maine were among the first industrially canned foods to become genuinely cheap, and cookbooks of the period treat them the way they treat anchovy paste and Worcestershire, as a reliable pantry item that could be turned into something hot in minutes. "Devilled" had by then settled into meaning mustard and cayenne rather than any single formula; the word is generally traced to the late eighteenth century as slang for fiercely seasoned food.