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Spanish Sandwich
Cut slices of white bread rather thick and toast; trim off crusts and lightly butter. Remove skin and bone from the sardines and lay them on the toast.
Sprinkle chopped olives over the sardines and the juice of a quarter of a lemon. Cover with another slice of buttered toast. Serve on a lettuce leaf.
A closed sardine toast that needs almost no translation, though the sardines of 1900 were a different article from the tins on shelves today.
- The sardinesPeriod tins held small fish packed in oil, often still with skin and backbone, which is why the recipe tells you to strip them. Modern skinless, boneless fillets in olive oil can go straight onto the toast; if you buy the traditional whole-packed kind, lift the fillets off the spine with a fork rather than trying to peel them.
- Drain them wellBlot the fish on paper before laying it down. Oil straight from the tin will soak into the toast and soften the sandwich.
- Thick toast, butter while hot"Rather thick" is not specified; something around half an inch suits the sandwich. Buttering while the toast is still hot helps the butter sink in, which may slow the fish oil and lemon soaking the bread. The recipe asks only for a light buttering.
- The olivesPlain green olives, chopped fine, suit the sandwich; rinse and dry brined olives, since brine plus lemon juice can overwhelm the fish. If buying unpitted olives, check for stones.
- LemonA quarter lemon over one sandwich is generous. Squeeze it over the fish rather than the bread, and use it immediately, before the acid dulls the sardines.
- Why "Spanish"The name most likely signals the olives rather than a regional dish. Pimento-stuffed olives would give the sandwich a bit of colour and are not out of keeping.
- Yield and servingEach pair of slices makes one sandwich; a small tin of sardines will fill perhaps two. Cut in halves or fingers on the lettuce and serve at once, as it will not hold or travel well.
Canned sardines were among the first industrially preserved foods to become cheap and ubiquitous, and by the end of the nineteenth century tins from Brittany, Portugal and Maine were staples of the American pantry. Sandwich books of the era leaned on them heavily: a tin, a lemon and some bread produced something that read as savoury and faintly continental without any cooking beyond the toaster. The "Spanish" label was applied loosely in this period to almost anything containing olives, peppers or pimento, much as "Russian" is often said to have signalled beetroot or soured cream and "Italian" tomato; it is a menu adjective rather than a claim of origin. The lettuce leaf beneath is generally associated with turn-of-the-century sandwich service, where a plated sandwich was expected to sit on something green whether or not anyone ate it.