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Cheese Canapes
8 croutes bread, 1/4 pound cheese, 2 tablespoons Crisco, salt and red pepper to taste, 1 teaspoon mustard, and 1 dessertspoon sherry. Cut the croutes of bread out of slices of stale bread with a round cutter 2 inches across. Fry the bread a golden color in hot Crisco. Cut up cheese; put it into a mortar with Crisco, and pound until it becomes a smooth paste; then season with salt and red pepper to taste. Add the mustard and sherry. When all ingredients are thoroughly mixed, put it on the croutes of bread; place them in oven until hot through, then serve at once.
A straightforward savoury: fried bread rounds spread with pounded cheese and run through the oven. The only real pitfall is heat — the paste should soften and gloss, not break into oil.
- Croutes"Croutes" here are simply rounds of bread fried in fat, cut with a 2-inch cutter. Stale bread is specified because fresh crumb absorbs far more fat and goes soggy; day-old firm white bread sliced about 1/3 inch thick is right.
- CriscoThis book was published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, then a new all-vegetable shortening. Any neutral frying fat works for the bread, and softened butter is better than shortening in the cheese paste for flavour.
- The cheeseUnspecified; a firm dry cheese such as Cheddar or an aged "American" would suit. Use a sharp Cheddar; avoid anything young and rubbery, which will not pound to a smooth paste.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does in twenty seconds what the mortar was for. Grate the cheese first, then pulse with the fat, seasoning, mustard and sherry until it forms a single smooth mass.
- Red pepper and mustard"Red pepper" means cayenne — start with a pinch, since 1/4 pound of cheese is not much to carry it. The mustard is most likely dry English mustard powder; if you use prepared mustard, the paste will be looser and sharper.
- DessertspoonA dessertspoon is about 2 teaspoons. That is enough sherry to be tasted against the cheese without thinning the paste.
- Oven and timingNo temperature is given; the recipe says only to put them in the oven until hot through. Around 400F for 5 to 8 minutes is enough — long enough to heat through and just bubble, short enough that the fat does not separate and pool.
- YieldEight canapes, which is a savoury course for four or a small plate of nibbles for two. They are only good hot, so the instruction to serve at once is meant literally.
This belongs to the British savoury tradition — a small hot, salty, often cheese-based dish served near the end of a formal dinner, after the sweet, and long a fixture of English and Anglo-American menus before it faded in favour of dessert as the final course. Marion Harris Neil, who compiled A Calendar of Dinners for Procter & Gamble around the middle of the 1910s, was working in that idiom while quietly substituting the company's new hydrogenated shortening for the butter or lard such a recipe would formerly have used; nearly every dish in the book calls for Crisco, which is the book's real purpose.