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Sardines Au Gratin
Heat a tablespoon oil in an earthen baking dish, add one exceedingly fine chopped onion and gently brown for five minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Wipe neatly and split open through front twelve good-sized sardines in oil, bone them, then arrange in dish over the onions. Knead in a bowl one ounce fresh butter, half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, two tablespoons fresh bread crumbs and a half bean finely chopped garlic. Divide mixture in small bits over sardines, set in a very brisk oven for six minutes, remove, and immediately send to the table in same dish.
A five-minute gratin that depends entirely on tinned sardines being good ones. The oven does almost nothing but melt the butter and toast the crumbs, so everything must be assembled and ready before it goes in.
- "A half bean" of garlicRead it as half a clove, minced to nothing, for the whole dish; the garlic is a background note, not the subject. The odd wording may reflect a close translation from French, though that is inference rather than established.
- Very brisk ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "very brisk" is usually read as roughly 450-475F. At much less than that, six minutes is unlikely to colour the crumbs.
- The earthen dish mattersA shallow glazed earthenware gratin dish holds heat and goes to the table as written, which the recipe requires. Thin metal is more likely to catch the onion and will not hold its heat as well at table.
- Sardines in oilTwelve good-sized sardines will take about three standard tins, depending on the size packed. Drain them, wipe off the packing oil, split along the belly and lift out the spine -- modern tinned sardines usually have bones soft enough to eat, but removing them gives a cleaner texture.
- Brown the onion first, separatelyBrown the onion first -- Five minutes of gentle browning with frequent stirring, as the recipe says, before the sardines go on top. Once they are laid over it the onion will cook little further, so it should be sweet and soft first.
- Kneaded butter, not meltedOne ounce is two tablespoons. Work it cold with the crumbs, parsley and garlic into a paste and dot it over in small pieces; melted butter runs off the fish and pools in the dish.
- YieldServes four as a first course with bread, or two as a light supper. It does not reheat — the crumbs go soggy and the fish tightens.
Sardines au gratin belongs to an era when the tin is often said to have been a fashionable ingredient rather than a pantry fallback. Commercial sardine canning grew up around Nantes and the Breton and Vendée coasts in the nineteenth century, and a French-inflected kitchen could treat tinned sardines in oil as the base of a composed dish rather than something to eat straight from the tin. The method here is standard gratin logic — a savory bed, the main item laid over it, a buttered crumb crust, brief fierce heat — and the phrasing, with its "half bean" of garlic and its instruction to send the dish to the table in the vessel it cooked in, suggests a text that may follow French practice fairly closely.