Anchovy Toast
One can of boneless anchovies in oil; toast squares of bread without crusts to a nice even brown; two anchovies are placed between two slices of toast and the yolks of hard-boiled eggs are chopped fine and sprinkled over same, the whites being cut into cubes and disposed over the top; dust with white pepper.
Garnish with a slice of lemon.
A savoury from the era when anchovies came packed flat in oil and a hard-boiled egg was treated as a garnish rather than a filling. Almost everything hinges on keeping the toast dry.
- The can"One can of boneless anchovies in oil" gives no size, but a flat tin of the usual sort holds roughly ten to twelve fillets. At two fillets per sandwich that is five or six rounds from a tin.
- Blot the filletsLift the anchovies out and press them between paper towels before they go on the toast. Oil-soaked toast collapses within a minute.
- Toast, not breadBoth slices are toasted, so the sandwich is crisp on the outside and stays that way only briefly. Assemble it at the last moment and serve at once; this is not a sandwich to make ahead or wrap.
- SaltNo salt appears in the recipe and none should be added. Cured anchovies are aggressively salty on their own.
- White pepperProbably chosen so that no dark flecks show against the chopped egg. Black pepper can be substituted if appearance is not a concern, though the flavour is not the same.
- The eggYolks chopped fine and whites in cubes give a two-tone effect. Push the yolk through a coarse sieve for a finer, more even scatter.
- ServingSuited to one or two per person as a first course or as a savoury at the end of a meal. The lemon slice may be squeezed over, though the recipe calls it only a garnish.
Anchovy toast belonged to the savoury, the small salty course that closed an English dinner after the sweet and before the dessert fruit, and it survived into American entertaining as a canapé. Anchovies had been a pantry staple in Britain since the eighteenth century, sold as whole cured fish, as bottled essence, and as the potted paste marketed under the name Gentleman's Relish, and the arrival of tinned boneless fillets in oil, generally traced to the later nineteenth century, made a dish like this trivially quick to assemble. Its appearance in a sandwich collection of this vintage says something about what "sandwich" then meant: not a lunchbox item but a small, composed, garnished thing served on a plate, where hard-boiled egg sieved into yellow and white was standard decorative vocabulary.