Elegant Egg Salad Sandwich Savoury

Savouries, like the Foot Guard Uniform and cream teas, are a uniquely British institution. Modern eaters will recognize these salty, spicy, small bites as appetizers, commonly appearing before the meal with drinks. Famous savouries include angels on horseback–that’s a bacon wrapped prune–and Fergus Henderson’s bone marrow and parsley salad.

Not a bacon-wrapped prune. Fascinating reading, if you share my interest in English culinary history.

Savouries are distinguished not by their components, but their traditional place in the English meal: after the sweet, ostensibly to accompany the final drops of red wine, and keep company with the postprandial port and/or sherry.

I had no photos of Sherry or port lying around. Instead, some lovely grapes on an English transferware platter.

Whether or not this is accurate remains a bone of contention amongst English culinary experts*, who point out the savoury’s flavor profile–spicy, salty, fishy–is not what comes to mind when serving fine wine.  Whatever the case, the savoury’s heyday has come and gone, and its scope was limited to those able to afford both multicourse meals and the staff to prepare them.

Happily, the savoury itself prevails. Older British cookbooks–the type with chapters given to hunting and shooting parties and teas–often have chapters devoted to savouries. Here we see the British passion for putting delicious things on toast expressed to its fullest, with recipes for mushrooms cooked in cream, innumerable ways with melted cheese on toast, and creative uses of dairy Americans are too fatphobic to consider. Our loss.

Then there’s the anchovy: the savoury couldn’t exist without this humble fish. Some of you may recoil. (Others may be hearing “That bowling ball! It’s my wife!”**) If you are an anchovy hater, I gently ask what your experience of anchovy is. Mine was dried-up brown things on extremely terrible pizza. If yours is similar, please buy yourself quality salt-packed anchovies from Italy or Spain, in a pretty tin. These are not expensive. Rinse the fish gently. The bones are edible, but they’re easily removed by running the fish under the cold tap. Now use the fish in a recipe. Notice what you don’t notice: fishiness. This is quite different from those awful rubber blobs on cheap pizza.

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Which brings us to today’s savoury recipe. The Elegant Egg Salad Sandwich Savory comes to us from Dorothy Allhusen’s Book of Scents and Dishes. It is a take on the Berkeley Sandwich, which bears no relation to the American university.

I made a few adjustments for American readers, who may lack access to Harvey Sauce and anchovy essence. I also halved the recipe, thinking my husband wouldn’t eat it. I was mistaken. He didn’t just eat it: he inhaled it.

Me last year: “Maybe we could buy some Thai Basil?” Husband: “Okay. But it might not thrive, we’ll have to see,” Me: knows nothing about plants, except they usually have leaves and I need to stay far away from them. “Um, fine, sure.” Plant: thrives, because my husband is the plant whisperer.

You can make delicate sandwiches using biscuit or cookie cutters, or you can make full-size, indelicate sandwiches. Remove the crusts, or not.

About the bread: sliced white bread is what you want here. You can get upscale fancy bread, or bake your own. But white bread, the politically incorrect, unhealthy stuff is what you’re after.

The elegant egg salad sandwich is ideal for mayonnaise haters, as it contains no mayo. It’s easy to make, doesn’t taste the least bit fishy, makes a lovely appetizer or lunch, and isn’t, as our British friends would say, the least bit fiddly.