Home › The Principles of Cookery › Shrimp Canapees
Shrimp Canapees
Cut some slices of stale crumb of bread the third part of an inch thick. Stamp these out with a plain round or oval cutter about two inches in diameter, and fry the rounds in butter till they are lightly browned. Let them get cold, then spread a little shrimp butter upon them. Ornament them by placing picked shrimps upon them, and lay them in a circle on a dish overlapping each other. Put a little parsley in the centre, and serve.
A cold savoury of fried bread rounds, shrimp butter and whole shrimps. Nothing here is difficult, but the recipe assumes you already know what shrimp butter is and that your shrimps come ready-boiled.
- Shrimp butterNot a commercial product. Pound the shells and a portion of the shrimps to a paste with an equal weight of softened butter, then press through a sieve, or blitz and strain. Season with a little cayenne, mace and lemon; it should be spreadable, not melted.
- "Picked shrimps"Cooked shrimps with heads, shells and tails removed. Probably the small brown shrimps, roughly the size of a fingernail; if you use larger prawns, cut them down or the proportions look wrong on a two-inch round.
- Stale crumbDay-old white bread, crusts cut away, sliced a third of an inch (about 8 mm). Fresh bread soaks up butter and collapses in the pan; stale bread fries to a crisp croûte that will hold its shape under a moist topping.
- Frying the roundsClarified butter is safer than whole butter here, which browns and speckles the croûtes before they crisp. Medium heat, both sides, then drain on paper and cool completely — spreading shrimp butter on warm bread melts it straight in.
- Assemble lateThe croûtes go soft within an hour or two of being spread. Fry and cool them ahead, keep them airtight, and butter and garnish shortly before serving.
- YieldA slice of a large sandwich loaf gives two or three rounds. Reckon on about 24 canapés from 8 oz (225 g) picked shrimps and 4 oz (115 g) butter, enough for eight to ten people with drinks.
- ServingServed cold, as a savoury at the end of dinner or handed round before it. The circle of overlapping rounds with parsley in the middle is the period presentation; a plain platter does the same job.
Canapé is French for a couch or sofa, the garnish being said, by tradition, to recline on its bed of bread. Cassell's places this among a run of small cold savouries that closed a formal English dinner, after the sweets and before dessert, a course generally regarded as peculiar to British practice and generally traced to the late nineteenth-century fashion for something salt to finish on. Shrimp butter is often linked to the older tradition of potting: brown shrimps sealed under spiced butter were a staple of the Lancashire and Norfolk coasts long before this book, and pounding the shells into the butter extracts colour and flavour that would otherwise be thrown away. The recipe assumes shrimps arrived already cooked and picked.