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Caviare on Toast
Make some squares of toast, butter them well, and spread some caviare over them rather thickly; dust a little cayenne over them, and put them in the oven for two minutes to get thoroughly hot through. Probable cost, 1s.
A savoury of the kind served at the end of a Victorian dinner, and one of the few recipes where the modern cook should probably ignore the instruction to bake. Two minutes in the oven suits the firm, heavily salted pressed caviare of the period rather than the fresh malossol grades sold now.
- The hinge: heatModern lightly salted caviare bursts and turns oily and grainy when heated; the delicate flavour goes flat. Warm the buttered toast instead and spread the caviare onto it off the heat. If you want to follow the original, use a firm pressed caviare and give it no more than a minute in a moderate oven.
- What "caviare" meant hereCassell's readers bought sturgeon roe, often the heavily salted or pressed grades imported from Russia, which were cheaper, saltier and much sturdier than today's product. Lumpfish, salmon or trout roe stands in perfectly well for the effect, though none of them is the same thing.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none, and does not even describe the oven. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a modern guess rather than anything the recipe specifies.
- CostOne shilling for the dish. Caviare was an indulgence, but a far less extravagant one than it is now, before sturgeon stocks collapsed.
- Salt and butterSalt the toast not at all. Caviare carries all the salt the dish needs, so use unsalted butter and put it on generously while the toast is still hot enough to absorb it.
- CayenneA dust means the barest shake. The point is a faint heat at the back of the palate, not a visible red speckling; too much buries the roe.
- Cut and yieldTrim crusts and cut each slice into four squares or fingers. A slice of bread and about a tablespoon of roe gives four bites; count three or four pieces per person as a savoury or a canape.
The savoury course — a small, hot, salty mouthful served after the sweet and before dessert — was an English peculiarity, and it is often said to have puzzled French cooks who thought the sequence backwards. Anchovy toast, devilled bones, cheese ramekins and caviare on toast all belong to that slot, and their job was to close the palate and set up the port. Caviare reached Victorian Britain as a Russian import, salted and pressed for the journey, and it turns up in dictionaries of cookery like Cassell's as an ordinary if costly larder item rather than a rarity. The heating instruction here reflects the savoury's requirement that it arrive hot; it also reflects a product tough enough to take the oven, which is no longer what is in the tin.