Butter al dente
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 168
FOOD FRIDAY: The Anchovy and Butter Sandwich
A READER, ALARMED by our latest cache of antique public-domain sandwich recipes, writes in to express their dismay at the early 20th century meatless palate:
Indignity does not have the household staff implied by the recipes of Mrs. Maria Matilda Ericsson Hammond, but today it was time for fish and butter anyway. Over the past few weeks, our family's social-media feeds have kept mentioning what must be this TikTok, in which Nigella Lawson sings the praises of eating thickly buttered bread topped with anchovies. "The butter should be thick enough, for me, to leave tooth marks when you bite into it," she explains.
Somewhere in the transmission or retransmission I had picked up the detail that the bread itself should be thick and crusty, too. One person who'd gone to the trouble of writing it up as a recipe was toasting the bread, but bread is bread and toasted bread is toast, and what Nigella Lawson said was "bread."
And I had some crusty bread. Curriculum Night at the high school had let out earlier than billed the previous evening, which had left me with a little bit of free time down by Lincoln Square, where it's possible to get an excellent loaf of bread. Where we live now is a bread desert, or at least a desert of good bread; there's a bakery that's charming and perfectly located and bakes bland, powdery, cake-crumbed loaves, the kind of bread grocery stores tried to sell as good bread in the 20th century. So I got a French sourdough loaf down in the West 60s and brought it home to help stretch a dinner of leftovers, and then I put the rest of it up in the cupboard so the cat couldn't maul it, making a mental note not to forget it and let it go stale.
So when lunchtime arrived, or at least when I got hungry again after elevenses, I retrieved the loaf and cut a slice. I'd tried this once before but it was sort of slapdash, so this time I focused. The thing about "tooth marks" as the measurement for butter is you can't be sure if you got it without biting into the thing you're in the middle of trying to prepare; also it's a little open-ended. If you bite into a whole stick of butter, you'll leave excellent tooth marks! And it makes me think the butter should be cold, for better tooth-marking, but the butter was out at room temperature, which makes it easier to spread anyway, so I just buttered the bread and then buttered it a bit more.
Nigella Lawson uses Ortiz anchovies, and seems to be selling Ortiz anchovies. I had a jar of Agostino Recca anchovies, which I think of as fancy. When I checked prices on Amazon afterward, it looked like Ortiz anchovies were a bit more expensive, but there are a lot of variables in play. I keep my anchovies in the fridge, so the olive oil was congealed into granules and it was a little tricky to dig the fillets out with a fork in one piece. They weren't as red and succulent-looking as Nigella Lawson's anchovies but I don't judge my life invidiously against what I see on social media.
I put my anchovies on the buttered bread not quite as densely as Nigella Lawson did hers, and then I blotted up the stray oil-granules before they could finish melting, so there wouldn't be too much of a layer of liquid oil on top of the softened butter.
Based on the tone of the discussion of the recipe, when I originally tried it, I'd been counting on some kind of alchemy in the interaction of the butter and anchovies, like when sardines mixed into cream cheese came out as a whole new texture. But it had been strictly additive: the anchovies were like anchovies, the butter was like butter, the bread was like bread.
That wasn't disqualifying! I like buying the anchovies in a jar instead of a can because it means that when I make something with anchovies, I can also hook an extra anchovy out of the jar and eat it straight. Or two. Sometimes three? I enjoy eating anchovies, and putting them on bread and butter meant license to eat more of them.
And this time around, the butter and anchovies somehow melded together a little—not all that much, still not as much as all the fuss about the marvelous unfussiness had suggested—but enough to make it something more than a snack of anchovies from a jar. Maybe if I'd let it sit out a little longer it would have gotten even more harmonious. But I was worried the cat would get it.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, September 26, 2024
★★ Water stood on the steel tops of washing machines in a cargo half-loaded or half-unloaded in the street. The gray was as gray as the previous days had been, but the chill had now given way to something hot and sticky. The rain was still falling but putting on the rain jacket seemed more uncomfortable than walking through it. At the bottom of Central Park, it was time to give up and put it on, as the raindrops spread perfectly timed overlapping rings over puddles in various shades of griminess. A stream of NYPD motorcycle officers in bright yellow-green highway patrol rain jackets rumbled up Madison Avenue. An hour later, eating a sandwich on a park bench in the intermittent rain was preferable to fighting for a table in a crowded cafe. The sandwich baguette stayed crispy even as the paper bag it came out of grew soft and soggy. A thin mist hung over the Pond, and pigeons hunched in the dim canopy of a low tree looked heavy and hawklike. A sudden flickering on the surface of the water announced that the rain had picked up again. The wet rocks looked like metal. Robins and a catbird ignored the shower to swarm over fruit-laden branches. Uptown, the rain had stopped and the sky was brightening. Weed smoke and rain-battered dog turds combined to give off a unified rankness. Immense late-season zucchini, water beading on their skin, lay stacked at a sidewalk stand.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast.
Tom Scocca
Click on this box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
VISUAL CONSCIOUSNESS DEP'T.
Art Exhibit
More consciousness at Instagram.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from 250 Meatless Menus And Recipes To Meet The Requirements Of People Under The Varying Conditions Of Age, Climate And Work, by Eugene Christian and Mollie Griswold Christian, published in 1910, and now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
ANCHOVY AND LETTUCE SANDWICHES
Remove bones of two or three anchovies. Chop fine, celery hearts with the fish. Cover unfired wafers or any wholesome bread or cracker (De Luxe preferred) with sweet butter, then with crisp lettuce leaf, dipped in dressing, then the fish and celery. Press firmly together and garnish with parsley.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
MARKETING DEP'T.
Supplies are really and truly running low of the second printing of 19 FOLK TALES, still available for gift-giving and personal perusal! Sit in the crushing heat with a breezy collection of stories, each of which is concise enough to read before the thunderstorms start.
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