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Sardine Sandwich No. 5
Pound eight boned and skinned sardines with two ounces of fresh butter, a little salt and cayenne. Spread the mixture on slices of brown bread lightly buttered, and over them lay a slice of skinned tomato. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and a pinch of sugar. Add a few drops of lemon juice. Form into sandwiches and cut into finger lengths.
A tea sandwich built on tinned fish, and the only real difficulty is keeping the tomato from wrecking the bread. Everything else is a five-minute job.
- The hinge: drain the tomatoSkinned tomato slices release a great deal of liquid once salted and sugared. Lay the slices on paper towels, salt them, and let them sit ten minutes before assembling, or the brown bread will be sodden before you cut the fingers.
- Butter quantityTwo ounces of butter is four tablespoons, softened, worked into eight sardines. That gives a spreadable paste; the additional "lightly buttered" bread is a separate, thin coat that seals the crumb against moisture.
- The sardinesEight sardines may be one 3.75 oz tin or nearer two, depending on the size of the fish; buy by count rather than by tin. Oil-packed is the likeliest pack for a recipe of this kind, though the recipe does not say. Bone and skin them if you like, though modern tinned sardines have soft, edible bones and skins that mash away invisibly.
- PoundingA fork against the side of a bowl does this faster than a mortar. A food processor will work but overshoots into a slick paste; stop while some texture remains.
- Brown breadMost likely a plain wholemeal or graham loaf rather than a steamed Boston brown bread, though the recipe does not specify. A firm, close-grained wholemeal sandwich loaf, sliced thin, is a safe substitute.
- SeasoningCayenne here is a pinch at most — sardines are already salty and the sugar is there only to lift the tomato, not to sweeten the sandwich. Taste the paste before spreading, since tinned fish varies a great deal in salt.
- Yield and servingOne tin fills about six slices of bread, or three sandwiches, cut into roughly a dozen fingers. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre in the first decades of the twentieth century, when cheap tinned goods made cold, portable food a middle-class staple, and several of them run to hundreds of numbered variations on a handful of fillings — hence a fifth sardine sandwich. Sardines were among the earliest and cheapest successes of the canning trade, packed in oil in France and later in Maine and Norway, and by 1900 a tin in the pantry was an unremarkable thing. Fingers rather than triangles or squares suggest the afternoon tea table, where anything eaten had to be manageable in one hand while the other held a cup.