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Bombay Toast
Fry the required number of croutes in Crisco. When cold spread with paste of pounded chicken and cream. Chop some capers, and lay in a thick line across the chicken paste. On one-half put grated yolk of hard-cooked egg, on the other half put grated white of hard-cooked egg, and serve.
A cold savoury built on fried bread — quick to assemble, but the components must be made in the right order and put together at the last minute.
- CroûtesThese are rounds or fingers of stale bread about 1/4 inch thick, fried until crisp and golden and then drained on paper. Cut them to the size you want served, since they cannot be trimmed once topped.
- CriscoThe book was written to promote Crisco, and any neutral frying fat does the same job. Clarified butter gives better flavour here; ordinary butter will brown too fast at frying temperature.
- Chicken pastePounded cooked chicken breast worked with enough cream to make a spreadable paste — a food processor does in seconds what a mortar did in ten minutes. Aim for the texture of thick hummus, or it will slide off the croûte.
- SeasoningThe original specifies none. The paste will want salt and white pepper, and perhaps a squeeze of lemon; the capers may not supply enough sharpness on their own.
- CapersRinse and pat them dry before chopping, whether brined or salt-packed, and chop them fine. Wet capers will bleed into the chicken paste and grey it.
- Grated eggHard-boil the eggs, cool them completely, then separate and press yolk and white separately through a fine sieve rather than grating — a box grater tears the white into damp shreds. The two-tone effect is the whole point of the dish, so keep the halves distinct.
- TimingFry the croûtes and cook the eggs ahead, but assemble no more than fifteen minutes before serving. Fried bread under a moist paste turns leathery quickly.
- YieldTwo croûtes per person suits a savoury or first course. The recipe gives no quantities at all, so scale the chicken and eggs to the number of croûtes you cut; roughly one chicken breast and a couple of eggs should cover a dozen small rounds.
This belongs to what is often said to be an Anglo-Indian habit of attaching an Indian place name to any small, sharply seasoned savoury served at the end of a formal dinner or handed round with drinks — Bombay, Madras and Indian in these titles tended to signal piquancy rather than any specific regional dish, and here the sharpness is supplied only by capers. The recipe comes from a book issued by the makers of Crisco in the years after the shortening's 1911 introduction, which is why a hydrogenated vegetable fat appears in place of the butter or lard an English cookbook of the same date would have named. The finish of sieved hard-boiled yolk, still called mimosa garnish in classical kitchens for its resemblance to mimosa blossom, was a standard trick for making a plain cold canapé look composed on a silver tray.