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Sardine Sandwich No. 2
Remove scales and bones from two boxes of sardines. Put the sardines in a mortar with the yolks of five hard-boiled eggs. Pound fine; add one tablespoonful of olive oil, the juice of one-half lemon, a pinch of mustard, a dash of pepper and salt, two sprigs of finely chopped watercress. When smoothly blended spread the mixture between thin slices of lightly buttered white or graham bread.
A tea-sandwich filling of the pounded-paste school, built for a mortar and adaptable to a food processor with almost no change in result. The only real balancing act is the ratio of egg yolk to fish.
- Two boxes of sardinesPeriod tins ran roughly 3 3/4 oz, so two boxes is about 7-8 oz of fish before draining. Two standard tins of oil-packed sardines today land in the same range.
- Scales and bonesMost tinned sardines now come cleaned, and the fine spine bones are soft enough to mash into the paste unnoticed. Lift out any heavy backbone from larger fish; skin can be slipped off with a fingertip if you want a paler, smoother spread.
- Mortar or processorA food processor does the pounding in about 20 seconds, but pulse rather than run it — over-processing turns the yolks pasty and the fish gluey. A fork and a shallow bowl also work and give a coarser filling.
- Five yolks is a lotFive hard-boiled yolks to 8 oz of fish makes a thick, dry, sliceable paste that will not soak the bread — the point of the recipe. If it fights the knife, loosen it with more olive oil rather than mayonnaise, which changes the character.
- A pinch of mustardMost likely dry mustard powder here, perhaps 1/4 teaspoon; the recipe does not say. Prepared mustard adds vinegar and water and will thin the paste.
- WatercressTwo sprigs is a whisper. A tablespoon of finely chopped leaves gives the pepperiness the filling is asking for, and stems should be left out or they string through the spread.
- Graham breadNineteenth-century graham bread is a coarse whole-wheat loaf; any good whole-wheat sandwich bread stands in. Lightly buttering the bread is not decoration — it seals the crumb against the oil in the filling.
- Yield and keepingEnough for about 10-12 rounds of finger sandwiches. The paste is better made an hour ahead and chilled, which firms it for spreading; it keeps a day or two covered, but assemble the sandwiches close to serving.
Sardine sandwiches turn up repeatedly in American sandwich and tea-table books of the 1900s because tinned sardines were then among the cheapest, most reliable fish a household could keep on a shelf — a canning industry had made them ordinary by the 1890s. The technique here, pounding fish smooth with hard-boiled yolk in a mortar, is older than the tin: it descends from the potted fish and fish-butter preparations of English and French cookery, where the yolk and oil act as a binder and the paste was pressed into pots under butter. The graham bread offered as an alternative takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American dietary reformer whose advocacy of coarse unsifted wheat flour in the 1830s attached his name permanently to whole-wheat bread. That a book of this period offers white *or* graham for the same filling suggests the wholemeal loaf had by then lost its reforming edge and become simply another choice at the tea table.