Take some lobster or crab-meat and pound in a mortar. Mix with 1 tablespoonful of butter; season with salt and pepper, a pinch each of mustard, cayenne, nutmeg and curry-powder and moisten with lemon-juice. Cut small rounds of toasted bread; scoop out some of the centre; fill with the mixture and cover with a curry sauce. Sprinkle with fine bread-crumbs and let bake in the oven a few minutes. Serve hot.
A hot canapé built on toast rounds, from the era when "oriental" on a menu meant little more than curry powder. The quantities are left almost entirely to the cook, so treat the proportions below as a starting point.
- QuantitiesThe only measured ingredient is the tablespoon of butter. Roughly 8 oz of picked lobster or crab meat to that tablespoon gives a spreadable paste; more butter makes it richer and easier to pipe. Expect about 18-24 small rounds.
- The mortarPounding in a mortar produces a smooth, slightly fibrous paste, not a purée. A food processor will do it in seconds but will overwork the meat into a gluey mass — pulse briefly, or chop finely by hand and mash with a fork.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe says only 'a few minutes'. A hot oven — somewhere around 425F — for roughly five minutes should be enough to brown the crumbs and heat the filling through without toughening the shellfish.
- Curry sauceIn Anglo-American cookery of this period a curry sauce generally meant a flour-and-butter roux cooked with curry powder and stock or milk — in effect a curried béchamel rather than an Indian gravy. Make it thick enough to sit on the canapé rather than run off.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powders of the period were generally mild and turmeric-forward. Modern blends vary widely in heat; taste before committing, since cayenne and mustard are already in the mix.
- The toast roundsToast the bread before scooping so the shells hold their shape. Day-old firm white bread cut with a 1½-inch cutter works best; fresh bread tears when you hollow it.
- ShellfishUse cooked meat. If starting from a live lobster or crab, cook and pick it first — the oven time here is far too short to cook raw shellfish through.
- ServingThese are best straight from the oven, since the toast softens as it cools. Assemble ahead, bake at the last moment, and serve hot as a first course or with drinks.
The canapé — a small piece of bread carrying a savoury topping — was a fixture of formal Anglo-American entertaining around 1900, served as a hot appetizer or as part of the 'savoury' course at the end of dinner. The name 'Oriental' here does no geographical work: in the cookery vocabulary of the period it tended to signal curry powder, which in American kitchens generally came by way of English cookery rather than from any direct Indian source. A book organised as a dish for every day of the year, ranging from risotto to haggis, was selling novelty and variety to hostesses who needed a different menu each evening, and the loose seasoning list here — mustard, cayenne, nutmeg, curry — is characteristic of the way such collections treated spice as an accent rather than a cuisine. Lobster and crab were cheaper relative to other proteins than they are now, which is part of why they turn up in something as offhand as a bread round.