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Caviar Canapé
Cut quarter-inch slices of white bread into rounds, spread with butter, then with caviar, that has been mixed with a little lemon juice. Edge each round with diced white of a hard-boiled egg and put a tiny mound of the powdered yolk of egg in the center.
A straightforward assembly job where the only real variables are the caviar and the temperature of everything on the plate.
- The bread roundsQuarter-inch slices of soft white sandwich loaf, cut into rounds with a small cutter; how many rounds a slice yields depends on the cutter and the loaf. If the rounds look likely to go limp under the butter they can be dried briefly in a low oven and cooled completely before spreading, though the recipe itself calls for no such step.
- Butter matters hereThe butter is a moisture barrier, not a flavour note. It must be genuinely soft so it spreads in a thin unbroken film without tearing the crumb; unsalted is better, since caviar brings its own salt.
- What caviar meant in this bookTinned roe of this period ranged from pressed sturgeon to lightly salted grades, and was often saltier than much of what is sold today. Lumpfish, trout roe or salmon roe all work; taste before adding lemon, because a modern tin may need none.
- Lemon juice, sparinglyA few drops only, stirred in at the last moment. Acid firms and dulls the eggs quickly, and a wet mixture will bleed into the bread. Some cooks prefer to squeeze the lemon over the finished canapés instead.
- Handling the roeFold with a rubber or wooden spatula, never a metal spoon pressed against the bowl, and stop the moment the juice is distributed. Broken eggs release liquid and the topping turns grey and slack.
- Hard-boiled egg, sieved"Powdered yolk" means cooked yolk pushed through a fine sieve, not a commercial egg powder. Chop the white to a fine even dice; both are easier to work with if the eggs are fully chilled first. One egg dresses roughly a dozen rounds.
- Timing and yieldAssemble not far ahead, keep covered and cold, and serve cold. Yield depends entirely on the cutter size and how thickly the caviar is spread; note that the recipe as written calls for a single egg, which will garnish only a dozen or so rounds.
Canapés like this belong to the era when American entertaining borrowed wholesale from French service, and the word itself is simply French for a sofa or couch — the bread being the seat on which the garnish sits. The caviar-and-sieved-egg combination was a fixture of hotel and club cold larders in the years when Russian sturgeon roe was a luxury import and, briefly, American sturgeon from the Delaware and the Great Lakes supplied a cheap domestic substitute before the fisheries collapsed. Its appearance in a book with a title like Cook and Be Cool is telling: this is a make-ahead, no-heat, no-sweat dish for the hostess doing her own cooking in a small kitchen.