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Sardines with Spinach Au Gratin
Remove stalks from a quart fresh spinach, wash well, drain on sieve, plunge in quart boiling water with teaspoon salt and boil for ten minutes. Thoroughly drain and finely chop up, place in a saucepan with an egg yolk, half ounce butter, a tablespoon cream, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Sharply stir while heating for two minutes, remove, and spread half quantity of spinach in a lightly buttered baking dish. Split open without separating twelve sardines in oil, bone, then nicely arrange over spinach and spread balance of spinach over sardines. Dredge over two tablespoons bread crumbs, arrange a few little bits of butter on top, set in oven for ten minutes, remove and serve.
A straightforward gratin that needs only two adjustments: the spinach is boiled far longer than modern practice allows, and the oven temperature is never stated.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the book offers no clue beyond the timing. Ten minutes is only enough to heat through and colour the crumbs, so a fairly hot oven (roughly 400-425F) suits; the dish is already cooked when it goes in.
- Spinach timingTen minutes in boiling water reduces spinach to grey mush. One to two minutes is enough to wilt it, after which it should be squeezed hard — the water it holds will otherwise thin the gratin into a puddle.
- A quart of spinachA volume measure of loose leaves is imprecise. A quart of leaves is only about 4 to 6 oz, cooking down to well under a cup once wrung out; scale up if you want more than a thin layer. Baby spinach needs no stalk removal.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of pepper — generous, and worth tasting toward rather than adding at once.
- SardinesTwelve sardines in oil is two or three standard tins, depending on the size of fish packed. Many modern tins come already boned and skinless; if so, skip the splitting and simply lay them out whole. Drain them well or the oil will pool under the crumbs.
- The egg yolkStirring a raw yolk into hot spinach for two minutes over heat sets it enough to bind. Keep the pan moving and the heat moderate, or the yolk scrambles into threads.
- Crumbs and browningTwo tablespoons of crumbs over a small gratin dish is a thin veil. Dried crumbs brown better than fresh; the dots of butter are what carry the colour, so do not omit them.
- YieldServes two as a light main course or four as a first course, in a dish of about a quart's capacity.
Sardines packed in oil were one of the first canned foods to reach ordinary tables in quantity, and by the time this book appeared they were a cheap, permanently stocked pantry item in Europe and America alike — the Breton canneries of the nineteenth century had made them so, with Portuguese production coming later and expanding chiefly after that period. That availability is the whole reason for a dish like this: a hot supper assembled from two tins and a bunch of greens, dressed up with the French vocabulary of au gratin — meaning simply browned under crumbs and butter — to lift it above the level of fish on toast. The pairing of oily fish with spinach and a yolk-enriched binding is often said to reflect hotel-kitchen practice of the period, where the same spinach base is described as doing duty under eggs, under sole, and under poultry.