Cut some slices of brown bread into fingers half an inch thick; spread with butter. Mix some Russian caviare with lemon-juice to taste and a tablespoonful of finely chopped shallots. Spread the fingers with the mixture and place an oyster in the centre of each. Sprinkle with salt and a pinch of paprica. Serve. Garnish with thin slices of lemon and parsley.
A canapé from the era when caviare, oysters and dark bread were the standard opening of a formal dinner. It is assembly rather than cooking, so the quality of four ingredients decides everything.
- Brown breadIn an English book of this period "brown bread" most often means a dense wholemeal loaf; in an American one the steamed Boston kind is also possible, though it is not what suits this dish. A firm dark wholemeal or rye cut half an inch thick holds the topping without collapsing; day-old bread cuts more cleanly than fresh.
- Russian caviareThe original means salted sturgeon roe, then imported from the Caspian in far greater quantity and at a fraction of today's relative price, though still a luxury. Wild sturgeon caviar is now restricted under CITES and priced accordingly; farmed sturgeon, or salmon, trout or lumpfish roe, all work here. Buy the least salty grade you can, since lemon and shallot are already sharpening it.
- Lemon juice, sparinglyRoe breaks down and weeps if it sits in acid. Mix the lemon and shallot in at the last moment and spread immediately rather than preparing the mixture ahead.
- ShallotsChop them as finely as the recipe insists, then rinse briefly in cold water and pat dry. This removes the raw sulphurous bite that otherwise dominates the caviar.
- The oystersThese are raw, shucked oysters, drained of their liquor so the bread does not go soggy. Small ones are wanted, one per finger; a large Pacific oyster will overwhelm the piece. Buy from a merchant who can confirm the harvest source, and be aware that raw shellfish carries a Vibrio risk that is significant for anyone pregnant, immunocompromised or with liver disease.
- Salt and paprika"paprica" in a book of this date almost certainly means the sweet Hungarian sort, used for colour and a faint warmth rather than heat or smoke. Taste before adding any salt at all: caviar and oysters together are usually salty enough.
- Yield and timingThe recipe gives no quantities. A 2 oz tin of roe and a dozen oysters will make about twelve fingers, one oyster each, enough for four to six people before dinner. Assemble no more than fifteen minutes before serving and keep cold; the bread softens quickly.
The book belongs to what is often described as a genre of "a dish a day" collections, in which each date carried a dish labelled by nationality through a long domestic year. What is labelled Russian here is really the Anglo-French dining room's idea of Russia: caviare, black bread, sharp onion and lemon, the elements of the zakuski table that European travellers and restaurants had picked up over the nineteenth century. Sturgeon roe from the Caspian reached Western Europe in volume by the late 1800s and appeared constantly on menus as a savoury or hors d'oeuvre, often paired, as here, with oysters, which earlier in the century had been cheap enough to treat as a garnish rather than the centrepiece, though English beds were depleted and prices rising by 1900. The addition of an oyster to a caviare canapé is an embellishment rather than a documented Russian practice, and the combination reads now as a small record of how differently both ingredients were priced a century ago.