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Nut and Olive Canapé
Cut stale white bread in crescents. Fry a delicate brown in deep hot Cottolene. Drain on brown paper. Mix equal parts of finely chopped olives and English walnuts, season with a few grains cayenne and moisten with Mayonnaise or Boiled Salad Dressing to the consistency to spread. Spread fried bread with mixture and garnish with very thin strips of pimentos; set pimolas in center of each canapé.
A fried-bread canapé from the era before crackers and toast points took over the cocktail hour. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the ingredients are trade names that have left the shelves.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which sponsored this book. Any neutral frying fat works: vegetable shortening, or a refined oil at 365F.
- PimolasA trademarked name for green olives stuffed with pimiento — the ordinary pimiento-stuffed olive of any supermarket. Slice or halve them if whole olives topple off the crescents.
- Stale bread mattersDay-old bread has lost enough moisture to fry crisp rather than absorb fat. Fresh bread will drink the oil and go limp under the spread.
- Cut thinSlice about a quarter inch and stamp crescents with a small round cutter used twice. Thicker slices fry dark outside before the crumb sets.
- Drain on brown paperThe period stand-in for paper towels. A rack over a sheet pan keeps the undersides crisper than flat paper does.
- Boiled Salad DressingA cooked, flour- or egg-thickened dressing found elsewhere in books of this date; it is tangier and less rich than mayonnaise. Either works, but add it sparingly — the mixture should hold its shape, not slump.
- Assemble lateFried bread stays crisp only an hour or so once spread. Fry and mix ahead, then top just before serving.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, eight slices of bread and about a cup of the olive-walnut mixture would make enough canapes to serve as one item on a larger tray.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was written by Elizabeth O. Hiller and published by the makers of Cottolene, which is why fried dishes in it tend to specify that shortening by name — the book is a cookery manual and an advertisement at once. The canape itself belongs to the American fashion, borrowed from French service, for small savoury mouthfuls opening a formal dinner; before the 1920s these were often fried or toasted bread rather than the cold cracker of later decades. Olives and English walnuts appear together in menus of the 1900s and 1910s, and pimiento — imported from Spain, then increasingly canned in the American South — supplied the red garnish that period cooks favoured on pale dishes.