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Watercress (Tablespoonfuls grated cheese)
2 tablespoonfuls grated cheese Bone anchovies, put them in basin or mortar with eggs, cheese, and one tablespoonful Crisco, and pound all well together. Mix remaining Crisco with curry powder, lemon juice, and salt to taste. Cut some thin brown bread, spread with curry mixture and layer of anchovy paste. Lay another piece of bread on top, and cut into fancy shapes. Arrange on a lace paper and garnish with watercress.
Sufficient for fifteen sandwiches.
The text as printed is a fragment: the ingredient list has been cut off after the grated cheese, so quantities for the anchovies, eggs, Crisco and curry powder are missing. What survives is workable if you read it as a two-part sandwich — a curried shortening spread and an anchovy-egg-cheese paste.
- The missing quantitiesOnly "2 tablespoonfuls grated cheese" and one tablespoonful of Crisco for the paste are actually given. For fifteen small sandwiches, a tin of anchovies, two hard-cooked eggs and about three tablespoons of shortening in total are in the right range, but these are inferences, not the book's figures.
- The eggsThe recipe never says how the eggs are prepared. Sandwich pastes of this kind normally used hard-boiled eggs, shelled and pounded in with the fish; raw egg would not make a spreadable paste and should not be used here.
- Anchovies then and now"Bone anchovies" means whole salt-cured fish that had to be filleted by hand. Modern tinned fillets in oil are already boned; drain them and pat dry, or the paste will be loose.
- SaltAdd salt only at the very end and taste first. Cured anchovies plus hard cheese carry a great deal of it already.
- Crisco in the pasteCrisco is used here as a butter substitute — the whole point of the book. Softened unsalted butter behaves better on bread and tastes better cold; shortening sets firm and waxy in the mouth once refrigerated.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powder of this period was generally mild and turmeric-heavy. Use a modest amount of a mild blend and let the spread stand twenty minutes so the raw edge mellows into the fat.
- Brown breadMost likely a plain wholemeal loaf rather than Boston brown bread. Cut it very thin and slightly stale so it holds up to being trimmed into shapes.
- Yield and servingFifteen sandwiches once the crusts are cut away for the fancy shapes — tea-table portions, not lunch. The lace paper is a doily.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new product: a solid vegetable shortening made by hydrogenating cottonseed oil, introduced in 1911. The book's method throughout is to take familiar recipes — in this case a thoroughly British anchovy tea sandwich, the sort of savoury spread that filled Edwardian sandwich-loaf pages — and substitute Crisco wherever butter or lard had stood. The result is a small collision of traditions: lace-paper doilies, fancy cutters and watercress garnishes borrowed from English tea-table etiquette, pressed into service as advertising for an industrial fat. Curried anchovy paste was itself a legacy of the British Empire's spice trade, and pounding cured fish with hard-boiled egg in a mortar is a technique older than either the curry powder or the shortening.</invoke>