Cut slices of bread into delicate circles and toast in butter; then take 1 ounce of chutney and 2 ounces of grated Parmesan cheese; spread the toast with ham and the chutney and sprinkle with grated cheese. Set in the oven a few minutes and serve hot, garnished with fried parsley.
May 22 — No. 22
Indian
A savoury canapé built on three assertive things — ham, mango chutney and Parmesan — under a brief blast of heat. The quantities given are enough topping for eight to twelve small rounds.
- Weights into spoonsOne ounce of chutney is about two tablespoons; two ounces of grated Parmesan is roughly two-thirds of a cup loosely packed. Chop any large mango pieces so the chutney spreads rather than sits in lumps.
- Toast in butter, not a toasterThe instruction is to fry the rounds in butter, which seals the crumb so the chutney does not soak through. Cut the circles with a 2-inch cutter and brown both sides in a skillet before topping.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe says only to set the rounds in the oven a few minutes. A hot oven, around 400-425F, will melt the cheese in two or three minutes. Longer and the ham dries and curls at the edges.
- The hamUse thin slices of cooked ham cut to the same circle as the toast, or finely chopped ham pressed into the chutney. A dry-cured ham is too salty here against the Parmesan.
- Chutney choiceA period "chutney" in an American or British kitchen usually meant a sweet, spiced fruit preserve, most often mango and often of the sort sold as Major Grey's. A sharp green coriander chutney will not behave the same way under cheese.
- Fried parsleyCurly parsley, thoroughly dry, dropped into 350F fat for about ten seconds until it stops sputtering and turns brilliant green. Wet parsley will spit violently; drain the sprigs on paper before frying.
- ServingCanapés of this kind are meant to go straight from oven to table while the cheese is still soft; they turn leathery within a few minutes of cooling.
"Indian" in a turn-of-the-century canapé often meant chutney, an Anglo-Indian import that had become a familiar item in British and American pantries by 1900, widely sold bottled and sweetened under brand names, though household recipes for chutney also remained common. The dish belongs to the savoury, the small hot, salty course the British served after the sweet at dinner and which American hostesses adopted as a first course or a card-party dish. A book organised as one dish a day from a different country leans on exactly this kind of shorthand: a single ingredient stands in for a cuisine, and a round of buttered toast under ham and Parmesan is filed as India. It says more about the reach of the imperial grocery trade than about Indian cooking, but the combination of sweet-spiced fruit against salt cheese is sound and survives in various forms on cheeseboards today.