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Salmon Canapes
Cut some slices of stale bread a quarter of an inch thick. Stamp these with a plain cutter into any fanciful shapes, and fry them in clarified butter till they are lightly browned. When cold spread anchovy butter over them, and lay on the butter thin slices of smoked salmon. Serve the canapes on a small dish.
A savoury from the era when a small salted mouthful closed the meal rather than opened it. Nothing here is difficult; the whole thing turns on the croûtes being properly cold and crisp before anything wet touches them.
- The hinge: let the fried bread go coldWarm croûtes melt the anchovy butter, which soaks in and turns the base leathery. Fry, drain on paper, and leave them at room temperature until completely cool and firm before spreading.
- Stale bread, quarter inchA day-old close-crumbed white loaf, cut about 6 mm. Fresh bread absorbs far more butter and fries greasy. A firm sandwich loaf works; airy sourdough with large holes does not hold the topping.
- Clarified butterButter with the milk solids removed, so it browns the bread without burning at the pan temperature needed. Ghee is closely related and sold ready-made, though it is cooked longer and tastes nuttier; plain butter cut with a neutral oil is a workable substitute.
- Anchovy butterNot a shop item in most places now. Mash 3-4 oil-packed anchovy fillets, or a teaspoon of anchovy paste, into 4 oz (115 g) softened unsalted butter with a squeeze of lemon. Use unsalted butter and taste before adding salt: anchovy and smoked salmon are both salty.
- Smoked salmonThe book means cold-smoked side, sliced thin, which is what is sold as smoked salmon today. Hot-smoked or flaked salmon will not lie flat and is the wrong texture here.
- Cutting the shapesSmall shapes from a plain cutter, sized for a single bite. Stamp the bread before frying, not after, or it shatters.
- Yield and timingA quarter of a small loaf gives roughly twenty small canapes, depending on the cutter. Assemble within an hour of serving; the fried bread stays crisp overnight in a tin, but not once buttered.
- ServingThese are savouries, served cold in the original scheme at the end of dinner after the sweet, usually with a fortified wine such as sherry or port. Served before a meal with a dry white or a cold beer they need nothing more than a turn of pepper.
Canape is French for a sofa or couch, and the culinary sense is traditionally explained as an analogy on it: the topping sits on its base as a person sits on a settee. Dishes of this kind belong among the small hot and cold savouries that closed a late-Victorian and Edwardian English dinner -- anchovy, cheese, roe and smoked fish on fried bread or toast, sharp and salty after the sweet. Salted and tinned anchovies were cheap and widely sold, and Scottish cold-smoked salmon was reaching London markets in quantity by rail. The recipe assumes anchovy butter is something the cook already has to hand.