Home › Fish › Anchovy Sandwich
Anchovy Sandwich
Pour off wine, then wash thoroughly in vinegar.
Allow them to soak in olive oil for a half-hour, remove, open lengthwise, and take out bones; place between thin slices of unbuttered bread. Garnish with an olive.
The recipe begins mid-process because it assumes an ingredient no longer sold: whole cured anchovies packed in wine, jarred with heads and backbones intact. Nearly every step here is about undoing that packing, and most of it is unnecessary with modern tinned fillets.
- What the recipe starts withThe wine that is poured off implies anchovies bought whole in a wine pack, a form no longer sold. The vinegar rinse presumably removes the packing liquid and any residual cure, and the olive oil soak would soften the flesh before boning.
- If you are using tinned filletsOil-packed fillets are already skinned, boned and mellowed. Drain them, blot on paper, and go straight to the bread. The vinegar wash would only make them sour and slack.
- If you are using salt-packed anchoviesThese still exist and are the closest thing to the original. Rinse the salt off under cold water, soak 20 to 30 minutes in cold water or milk rather than vinegar, then open lengthwise, lift the backbone out with a thumbnail, and let them sit in olive oil half an hour as written.
- BoningOpen the fish along the belly and lay it flat. The spine pulls away in one piece from the tail end; the fine pin bones are soft enough to eat and need not be chased.
- Unbuttered bread is deliberateUnbuttered bread -- The recipe specifies it, and the fillets carry their own oil, so butter is not needed. If the bread seems dry, brush it with a little of the soaking oil instead. The recipe calls for thin slices; it says nothing about crusts.
- SaltAdd none. A cured anchovy is the seasoning, and two or three fillets will salt a whole round of bread.
- Quantity and yieldThe original gives no numbers. Two to three fillets per small sandwich is right; a standard 2 oz tin makes four to six tea sandwiches cut in fingers or triangles.
- The olive garnishThe recipe asks only for an olive. A green olive, pitted, whole or halved, is the usual reading; its brine echoes the fish.
The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book belongs to the moment when the sandwich stopped being a slab of cold meat and became a formal course for luncheons, teas and card parties, which is why the instructions here concern themselves with garnish and thin unbuttered slices rather than with feeding anyone substantially. The anchovy earned its place on that table through the British and American taste for savoury pastes and relishes; salted anchovy had been a pantry staple in Europe for centuries, and is generally traced back to the fermented fish sauces of the Roman kitchen. This recipe assumes the cured fish comes packed in wine, one of the forms in which it reached the kitchen alongside dry salt in kegs and the anchovy essences and bottled pastes sold under proprietary names. Oil-packed fillets in flat tins eventually displaced all of them, and with them the elaborate business of washing, soaking and boning that takes up most of this entry.