Home › Fish › Sardine and Cheese Sandwich
Sardine and Cheese Sandwich
Equal parts of boned and skinned sardines and cream cheese mashed to a pulp. Mix and place between thin slices of white or rye bread. Garnish with a pickle.
A two-ingredient spread that stands or falls on the sardines. Everything else is assembly.
- Boning and skinningModern brisling and small Norwegian sardines have soft, edible bones and skin that mash into the spread without notice; only the larger Portuguese or Spanish sardines really need the backbone lifted out. The recipe's instruction to bone and skin suggests larger fish than many tins hold today.
- Drain them wellOil left on the fish will separate from the cheese and soak straight through thin bread. Blot the fillets on paper before mashing.
- Cream cheese, then and nowThe cream cheese of this period was a fresh, unstabilised curd cheese, softer and tangier than a block of modern cream cheese. Bring a modern block fully to room temperature, or use Neufchâtel, so it mashes to a pulp rather than a paste that tears the bread.
- Equal parts, by weightEqual parts -- The recipe does not say whether by weight or volume; weight is the easier reading. One standard 3.75 oz tin of sardines, drained, against roughly the same weight of cheese fills about four sandwiches on thin-sliced bread. Mash with a fork rather than a processor — the mixture should keep some texture.
- What the recipe leaves outNo seasoning is specified at all. Lemon juice, black pepper and a little of the pickle chopped fine all belong here, tasted as you go.
- Bread and holdingThin slices, crusts trimmed if you are following the spirit of the book. These are best made within an hour or two; the spread is wet enough that sandwiches held overnight go limp.
Eva Greene Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book appeared in 1909, in the middle of a American enthusiasm for the sandwich as a refined food — tea sandwiches, club sandwiches, luncheon sandwiches, all trimmed and thin and a long way from a laborer's hunk of bread and meat. Tinned sardines were the natural fish for such a book: cheap, shelf-stable, universally available, and already a fixture of the chafing-dish and picnic literature of the period. Pairing them with fresh cream cheese was one recognized approach, the cheese softening the oily fish much as butter would. The pickle garnish is a period signature — sandwich chapters of this era often finish a savory recipe with a pickle, an olive or a radish, less as flavor than as the expected furniture of the plate.