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Sardine Toasts, Devilled
Prepare six lightly buttered toasts. Place two medium, split sardines over each toast. Spread a very little French mustard over the sardines. Dredge over a tablespoon bread crumbs; divide a tablespoon butter over the top; place on a tin and set in the oven for five minutes. Remove, and serve in a dish with a folded napkin, and with six "quarters" of lemon around the dish.
A savoury from the era when tinned sardines were a fashionable pantry staple. The whole thing takes under fifteen minutes, and the only real risk is drying the fish out.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; period recipes of this kind often left it to the cook's judgement. A hot oven (around 425F) for five minutes works, or run it under the broiler for two to three minutes if you want more colour on the crumbs.
- Splitting the sardinesLarger tinned sardines open along the belly; lift out the backbone if it bothers you, though in brisling and small sardines the bones are soft and edible. Two split fish per toast means four halves laid cut-side down.
- French mustardUsually taken to mean a smooth prepared mustard of the Dijon type rather than the sweet yellow American style, though the term was used loosely. "A very little" is meant literally — a scant quarter teaspoon per toast is enough, or the mustard will bury the fish.
- Devilled, in this senseThe devilling here is mustard alone. If you want the fuller period treatment, a few drops of Worcestershire or a pinch of cayenne in the melted butter is consistent with the style.
- Crumbs and butterOne tablespoon of crumbs and one of butter are for all six toasts, not each — a thin dusting. Use dry white crumbs; fresh soft crumbs will steam rather than crisp. Melting the butter and drizzling it browns the topping more evenly than dotting cold pats.
- The toastToast firm white bread until quite dry and crisp before buttering. Soft bread collapses under the oil from the sardines within a minute or two of leaving the oven.
- ServingServes six as a savoury or first course, three as a light lunch. The folded napkin is conventional presentation for such dishes and will absorb some oil; a warmed plate does much the same job. Serve immediately — these do not hold.
Sardine toasts belong to the savoury course, the small hot salt-and-spice dish that closed a formal English dinner after the sweet, and which also appeared in American cookbooks as a supper or luncheon item. "Devilled" had by then come to mean, broadly, anything treated with mustard, cayenne or Worcestershire and browned, a usage generally traced to the late eighteenth century. The recipe depends entirely on the tinned sardine, which French and later Norwegian and Portuguese canneries turned from a perishable local fish into a shelf-stable store-cupboard item. The lemon quarters and the folded napkin are the marks of a dish expected to arrive at table properly dressed, however humble its contents.