Fish Paste Sandwich

Long before a fridge stood in the kitchen, fish paste was how you kept fish in a cupboard, and that history is what you taste. It is cooked fish, white fish or herring or anchovy, ground to a dense brownish-grey emulsion and salted hard enough to sit sealed for months at room temperature without turning. The preservation is the flavour: the cure pushes the savour past anything fresh fish carries, into a deep, salty, slightly fermented intensity that fills the mouth from the smallest amount. The sandwich is built around that intensity, a scrape on bread, and the whole skill is keeping the scrape small.

The strength sets the portion. Spread for shelf life rather than for taste, the paste is concentrated and salted to a point where a thin pass is already a full savoury hit, so the knife takes the barest scrape and stops well short of a layer. Lay it on thick and the salt overwhelms everything and the slice becomes inedible; lay it too thin and there is nothing but buttered bread. The working amount is a mean, even film, dark against the crumb, applied with the restraint of someone who knows the jar bites. This is nothing like the breaded fried-fish sandwiches; there is no patty, no coating, no heat, only the smear and the discipline.

A light butter underneath does the carrying. Spread before the paste, it gives the scrape a slick to ride and pulls the dark film even across the slice so it does not band into a salty stripe with pale bread beside it. The paste has been ground past any flake or bone, so it lends savour and no structure whatsoever, which is why the bread is kept soft and plain; a robust or seeded loaf would push against a filling that has nothing to give back and reduce the sandwich to chewing crust. Pressed and cut small, it keeps for hours, the film settling into the crumb rather than sliding out.

The smell is the tell, a strong cured-fish savour with a faint mineral, almost anchovy depth that announces itself before the bite. The first taste is a wave of salt and concentrated sea, dark and intense, sitting on a soft uniform texture with nothing to chew. There is no freshness in it and no surprise, just a deep savoury hum that floods the palate and then recedes, leaving a salty trace at the back of the tongue. The crumb gives, the butter slicks, the paste delivers its single strong note. Eaten in a small triangle it satisfies the way a thing twice as large and half as strong would not.

It is the most old-fashioned fish sandwich Britain keeps, the paste pot a fixture of the wartime and post-war larder when refrigeration was scarce and a sealed jar of fish was a reliable filling. It read as plain, frugal, slightly austere food, the sandwich of a packed lunch and a thrifty tea, and it carries a faint period flavour even now. What people remember of it is digging a knife down to the bottom of a nearly emptied pot, the jar bought to live in the cupboard against a day when a sandwich is wanted and nothing fresh is in.

Its kin are the other potted fish, each a different sea creature put through the same Victorian process. Anchovy paste is the sharp, intensely salted ancestor of the whole line; bloater paste is made from cold-smoked herring and carries a heavier smoked note; the crab and shrimp pastes bring shellfish to the same potting. Gentleman's Relish is the spiced anchovy version raised to a luxury. The salmon paste is the milder, pinker, sweeter member that softens the formula for a gentler palate. What binds them all is the pot and the cure, not the fish.

Burgess, the Strand, and the Pot

The trade that made potted fish a branded British staple has an exact founder. John Burgess set up as an Italian warehouseman, a seller of imported delicacies, at 101 the Strand in London in 1760, and in 1775 introduced Burgess's Essence of Anchovies, the first fish sauce to win a nationwide reputation, sold from stoneware pots that collectors still dig up today. Burgess's anchovy preparations put potted, salted fish on respectable tables and set the template every later paste followed.

Smoked-herring paste came up through the great Victorian fishery. Bloater paste, made from the lightly cured whole herring landed in winter at Great Yarmouth, was produced to a guarded recipe at Sainsbury's Blackfriars works from the 1890s, the fish boned, ground, spiced, matured for two or three months, and sealed into small pots under a waxed disc and a foil capsule against spoilage. The paste pot was a preserving technology first and a sandwich filling second, which is why every one of them is salted to the edge of too much.

Burgess opened at 101 the Strand in 1760 and launched his Essence of Anchovies in 1775, and pots from his fish-paste line were aboard Nelson's HMS Victory at Trafalgar in 1805.