Prepare circular pieces of buttered toast. Then mix 1 cup of chopped fish with 3 sweet pickles minced fine, and 2 tablespoonfuls of Madras chutney; moisten with 2 tablespoonfuls of Hollandaise sauce. Spread this mixture over 8 pieces of toast; sprinkle with 3 tablespoonfuls of grated Parmesan cheese. Let bake for five minutes and serve.
A late-Victorian savoury of the type served hot at the end of a formal dinner or with drinks beforehand. The recipe assumes you have cooked fish, hollandaise and toast rounds already to hand, which is the main thing to plan for.
- The fish is cooked fishThe fish -- the recipe does not specify, but "1 cup of chopped fish" is almost certainly cooked flaked fish: poached cod, haddock, salmon or halibut. Five minutes in the oven will not cook raw fish through, so poach or bake it first and pick it over for bones.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. For a brief gratin of this kind, around 425F for five minutes browns the Parmesan without drying the toast; a broiler set high for two to three minutes does the same job faster.
- Toast roundsCut circles with a 2-inch cutter from firm white bread, toast them, then butter while warm. Untoasted bread collapses under a moist topping.
- Madras chutneyA sweet-hot chutney of the Anglo-Indian type, usually mango-based; bottled mango chutney is the nearest modern equivalent. Chop any large fruit pieces so the mixture spreads evenly.
- Sweet picklesPeriod sweet pickles were fruit or vegetables put up in sweetened spiced vinegar, most often small cucumbers; sweet gherkins are the closest thing today. Mince them fine and blot them, or the topping will weep onto the toast.
- Hollandaise as binderTwo tablespoons is a binder, not a sauce; a thick, well-emulsified hollandaise holds the mixture together in the oven. Use it while barely warm and mix off the heat so it does not break.
- YieldEight canapés, enough for four people as a first course or eight as one bite each with sherry. Assemble shortly before baking rather than in advance.
"Canapé" is French for a sofa or couch, transferred in nineteenth-century cookery to a piece of bread or toast on which something reclines; by the 1890s hot canapés and "savouries" were standard closing or opening courses at English and American dinners. The "Spanish" label here tells you more about the book's format — a dish assigned to each nation for each day of the year — than about Spain, since chutney, Parmesan and hollandaise between them point to Anglo-Indian, Italian and French practice rather than Spanish. National attributions in turn-of-the-century recipe calendars were often loose. What the recipe does suggest is a household economy of leftovers: a cup of poached fish, a spoonful of hollandaise and the standing jars of chutney and pickle, dressed up as something to serve to guests.