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Sardines for Hors D'Oeuvre
Carefully open a box French sardines with about twelve in the box. Place six nice white leaves well-cleaned lettuce on a side dish, then arrange the sardines on the leaves, and send to the table with six quarters lemon arranged on the leaves as well.
An assembly rather than a cooked dish, and the only real decisions are which tin to buy and how cold to serve it.
- "A box French sardines"The recipe itself specifies about twelve fish to the box, so the tin it assumes held roughly a dozen small sardines. A modern 3.75 oz tin holds four to six; buy two if you want twelve. Look for sardines packed in olive oil rather than soybean oil or water, since the oil clinging to the fish is part of the dish.
- Serves sixTwo sardines and a lemon quarter per person, as a first course. The original assumes a single side dish passed at table, not individual plates.
- Opening the tin carefullyThe instruction is not fussiness. Sardines this small break at the spine the moment they are lifted wrong. Drain off most of the oil first, then slide a narrow spatula or the tin lid itself under two or three fish at a time and lay them down in one motion.
- The lettuce"Nice white leaves" means the pale inner heart of a head lettuce, the part generally prized in period cookery. Little Gem or the inner leaves of romaine or iceberg give the same crispness and the same shallow cup shape to hold the fish.
- Serve coldThe recipe gives no temperature instruction; this is a modern suggestion. Chilling the unopened tin and keeping the lettuce in ice water until you dry it will stop the leaves going limp under the fish.
- What is missing, and deliberately soNo dressing, no vinegar, no pepper. If you want to bring it closer to modern taste, a few drops of the tin oil and a turn of black pepper over the fish is within the spirit of the thing; the lemon is meant to do the rest at table.
- Bones and skinThe fine bones in small sardines are edible and soften completely in the canning retort. There is no need to lift them out, and doing so will destroy the fish.
Hors d'oeuvre meant a small salted or pickled thing eaten before soup, and tinned fish was the most reliable version available to an American household year round. The prestige here is entirely in the word "French": Nantes and the Breton coast had been canning sardines in oil since the 1820s, and imported tins commanded a price that domestic Maine-packed sardines, canned in quantity from the 1870s onward, never did. That a general cookbook thought it worth printing an instruction this slight says something about how much of the cook's job was arrangement rather than cooking. The lemon quarters and the lettuce leaf are the whole recipe; the fish arrived already made.