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Savage Club Canapes
Cut slices of stale bread into circles the size of fifty-cent pieces; brown in a little hot butter; lay on paper to absorb the grease. Stone some olives; fillet half as many anchovies; wash them; dry them and roll each one up as small as possible and insert it in an olive in place of the stone; trim one end of the olive so that it will stand. Then put a drop of thick mayonnaise on the center of each one of the rounds of bread, which must be quite cold; stand the stuffed olive on it and put a drop of mayonnaise on the top to cover the opening in the olive.
A cold canapé with three components and one real difficulty: getting an anchovy-stuffed olive to stand upright on a coin of fried bread. Work in stages and keep everything cold and dry.
- Fifty-cent piecesThe old US half-dollar is about 1.2 inches across, so cut the bread rounds at roughly 30 mm — a small cutter, an apple corer's wide end, or the mouth of a spice jar. Larger rounds look clumsy under a single olive.
- Stale bread is not optionalDay-old close-crumbed white bread fries to a crisp round; fresh bread drinks butter and slumps. Fry in clarified butter or a butter-oil mix to avoid the milk solids scorching at that thickness, then drain and cool completely.
- The anchoviesThe instruction to wash and dry them points to salted or brine-packed anchovies rather than modern oil-packed tins. Salt-packed fillets need rinsing and a short soak; oil-packed fillets need only blotting dry, or the mayonnaise will slide.
- ProportionsFilleting an anchovy gives two fillets, so half as many anchovies as olives works out at about one fillet per olive, each rolled as small as possible. Use large green olives, queen or Cerignola size, pitted; a cherry-sized olive has no cavity to speak of.
- Trimming the baseSlice a thin disc off the blunt end so the olive sits flat. Do this before stuffing, and check each one stands on the board before it goes near the bread.
- Mayonnaise"Thick" is doing structural work here — the lower drop is glue and the upper drop is a plug. A stiff commercial mayonnaise holds better than a loose homemade one, and avoids serving uncooked egg at room temperature; if you do make your own, use pasteurised eggs and keep the tray chilled.
- Assemble lastBread rounds and stuffed olives can be prepared ahead and held separately, the bread at room temperature and the olives covered in the refrigerator. Once joined, the bread begins to soften fairly quickly.
- YieldThe original gives none. Reckon two to three per person as part of a drinks spread; a standard jar of large pitted olives should give a couple of dozen usable ones, depending on drained weight and size.
The Savage Club was founded in London in 1857 as a bohemian gathering of writers, artists, actors and musicians, and its name carried clubland associations of the same broad kind as the Reform or the Garrick — enough that a dish borrowing it announced itself as metropolitan and slightly raffish. Naming savouries after clubs was a recognisable habit in Victorian and Edwardian cookery, where anchovy-and-olive mouthfuls on fried bread croûtes belonged to the savoury course served after the sweet, or to the newer fashion for things eaten standing up with a drink. Whether the Savage Club itself ever served precisely this combination is not documented, and such attributions were often aspirational; what the recipe does show is how quickly a London club-dining flourish travelled into a household manual that elsewhere concerns itself with blacking stoves and rendering suet.