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Sardine Sandwich
Remove the skin and bones from two boxes of sardines, and pound the meat to a paste. Add a teaspoonful of anchovy paste, a dash of salt and red pepper, and rub in the yolks of six hard-boiled eggs, with two tablespoonfuls of olive oil. Spread mixture on toasted bread. To be eaten while toast is hot.
A savoury spread of the tinned-fish era, meant to be made in a mortar and eaten immediately. The whole point is the contrast between the cold, oily paste and hot toast, so assemble at the last minute.
- Two boxes of sardinesA "box" is a flat tin; modern tins run about 3.75 oz net weight, though period tin sizes varied. Two tins give perhaps 6 oz of fish once the skin and backbones are stripped out. Sardines packed in olive oil suit this better than those in water or tomato sauce.
- Skin and bonesModern small sardines have soft, edible bones and thin skin, and many cooks leave both in for calcium and flavour. Removing them, as written, produces a smoother and paler paste; it is a texture decision, not a safety one.
- Red pepperThis means cayenne, not paprika and not sweet peppers. A dash is about an eighth of a teaspoon; the mixture should warm the back of the throat, not burn.
- SaltSardines and anchovy paste are both heavily salted already. Taste before adding any at all.
- Six egg yolksThat is a large proportion to 6 oz of fish, and it is doing the work of a binder, softening the anchovy and giving the paste body. Sieve the cooked yolks or crumble them fine before working them in, or they stay grainy. The whites are not used; keep them for a salad.
- Pounding to a pasteA food processor does in twenty seconds what a mortar does in five minutes. Pulse rather than run it, and add the olive oil last in a thin stream so the paste emulsifies instead of splitting.
- Anchovy pasteStill sold in tubes. If you have only whole salted or oil-packed anchovies, mash two fillets to a smooth paste as a substitute for the teaspoonful.
- Serving and yieldToast the bread only when the paste is ready — the instruction to eat it while the toast is hot is the hinge of the recipe, and cold toast turns the whole thing leaden.
Tinned sardines were one of the great convenience foods of the late nineteenth century, cheap, keepable and genteel enough for a tea table, and sandwich books of the period lean on them heavily. This particular formula belongs to the family of English savouries built on pounded fish, anchovy and hard-boiled yolk — the same logic behind potted fish pastes and the commercial anchovy relishes sold in stoneware pots from the early 1800s. The insistence on hot toast suggests the savoury course rather than the picnic basket: a small hot bite served at the end of a meal or with drinks, a fashion at its height in Britain and the eastern United States around the turn of the twentieth century.