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Japanese Egg Sandwich
Chop four hard-boiled eggs and three boned sardines fine, add a teaspoonful of melted butter and rub to a paste; season with pepper and salt and a little mayonnaise dressing; cut in slender strips. Garnish with parsley and an olive.
A sardine-and-egg paste filling from the era of tea-table sandwiches, when "Japanese" was a decorative label rather than a description of technique. The recipe assumes you already know to spread it on thin buttered bread and trim the crusts.
- No bread is specifiedThe recipe assumes it. Sandwiches of this type were generally made on thin bread, and "cut in slender strips" points to narrow finger sandwiches, though the recipe gives no bread, no butter for the slices and no count.
- Boned sardinesTinned sardines packed in oil, drained, with the backbone slipped out and the tail pinched off. Three fish is a good part of a small tin, so scale up if you want a fuller flavour.
- Rub to a pasteThe hinge of the recipe. The eggs and sardines are chopped fine, then worked with the butter until smooth; a lumpy filling falls out of thin bread.
- Melted butterA teaspoonful is the binder, and it must go in warm so it coats rather than sets in flecks. The mayonnaise then loosens the paste to spreading consistency; add it by the half-teaspoon.
- Salt with a light handTinned sardines are already salted, as is commercial mayonnaise. Season at the end, after tasting the finished paste.
- YieldFour eggs and three sardines make a modest bowl of filling; the recipe gives no yield.
- Holding and servingAn egg-and-fish paste is best made the same day and kept covered and chilled until serving. The recipe calls for parsley and an olive as garnish but does not say where they go.
Turn-of-the-century American sandwich books ran to long numbered lists of fillings, and the geographic names attached to them were largely ornamental: "Japanese," "Russian" and "Spanish" sandwiches usually signalled novelty for a card party or afternoon tea rather than any connection to the cuisine named. The label most likely reflects the long vogue for Japanese design in American parlours after the 1876 and 1893 international exhibitions, when anything slender, delicate and decoratively arranged could be called Japanese. What is genuinely of its moment is the sardine tin. Cheap, reliably preserved fish had become a pantry staple by the 1900s, and it turns up constantly in these books as the savoury note in egg pastes, precisely because it kept indefinitely and needed no cooking.