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Sardines, Meuniere
Open can of twelve sardines, place on a clean cloth and wipe well. Thoroughly heat a tablespoon melted butter in frying pan, carefully place sardines in pan one beside another without breaking, briskly fry for two minutes on each side, lift up and place on a hot dish. Add a half ounce butter to pan, fry on fire until a nice brown colour, squeeze in juice of half a sound lemon, add a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, lightly mix, pour over sardines and serve.
A two-minute pan dish that depends almost entirely on the sardines being dry before they touch the butter. Everything else is timing.
- Drain and dry properlyCanned sardines carry a lot of oil or brine, and wet fish will steam and tear rather than colour. Blot both sides and let them sit on paper a few minutes before frying.
- What "a can of twelve" meansA tin holding twelve fish is larger than today's standard 3.75 oz can, which generally holds somewhere around four to six sardines, so two or three modern tins would give roughly the quantity intended, serving three or four as a first course.
- Choose the right tinSardines packed in olive oil hold together best. Those in tomato or mustard sauce will scorch and muddy the pan butter; brine-packed fish are softer and more likely to break.
- Half an ounce of butterThat is one tablespoon, or about 14 g, for the pan sauce, on top of the tablespoon used for frying.
- The hinge is the brown butterMeuniere lives or dies on that second addition of butter cooked to a nutty brown, not black. Watch for the foam to subside and the milk solids to turn hazelnut-coloured, then add the lemon juice immediately to stop the cooking.
- Handling the fishCanned sardines are already cooked and very fragile. Turn them once with a thin offset spatula, and take the two minutes a side as an upper limit; the point is colour, not doneness.
- "A sound lemon"Simply an unblemished one. Half a lemon yields roughly a tablespoon of juice, which is about right for a dozen small fish.
- ServingServe at once on a warmed dish with bread or toast to catch the butter; the sauce is at its best straight from the pan and loses its gloss as it cools.
Meuniere means "miller's wife", the name traditionally explained by the light dusting of flour a fish takes before it meets brown butter and lemon. That the sardines here are never floured shows how loosely the term travelled: the label seems attached here to the finishing sauce itself, beurre noisette sharpened with lemon and parsley, rather than to any flouring. The dish also reflects what a canned sardine was in this period. Tinned in Brittany and later in Maine and Norway, sardines were among the first industrially preserved foods to reach ordinary kitchens, and this recipe treats them as a respectable pantry staple rather than a stopgap, dressing them with a classic French sauce and sending them to the table as a hot entree.