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Caviar in Lemon Cups
Cut lemons in half, scoop out the pulp, cut a little piece off the end so that the half lemon will stand as a cup. Fill the shells with caviar mixed with a little lemon juice and decorate with slices of hard-boiled eggs.
An assembly job rather than a cooked dish, so nearly everything depends on the caviar you buy and how gently you handle it. A few notes on quantities and technique the original takes for granted.
- The hinge: handle the roe, don't stir itCaviar is folded, never beaten. Add the lemon juice by the drop and turn the eggs over two or three times with a soft spoon; more than that and the grains burst into a grey paste. Use bone, horn, mother-of-pearl or plastic rather than metal, which is generally said to give the roe a tinny taste.
- QuantityThe book gives none. Reckon on about a tablespoon per lemon half, so a 2 oz (55 g) jar fills roughly four cups. Six to eight halves is a sensible plate for a small party as one item among several.
- What "caviar" meant hereThe jar on the shelf at this date could be pressed or salted sturgeon roe, imported and heavily salted, or domestic lake sturgeon. Today the same role is filled by salmon, trout, whitefish or lumpfish roe at a fraction of the price of true sturgeon caviar; lumpfish roe is dyed, and the dye will bleed into the lemon.
- Salt and lemon juiceCured roe is already salty and the recipe adds acid on top. Taste the caviar first: with a well-salted product a squeeze of juice over the finished cups is plenty, and no extra salt goes anywhere near the dish.
- Cutting the shellsHalve the lemons across the equator, not end to end, and shave only a thin slice off the base or the juice runs out. A grapefruit spoon or a small paring knife works better than scooping; take out the flesh and membrane but leave the white pith as a wall.
- The eggsHard-boil, cool completely in cold water, and slice with a wire egg slicer for clean rounds. Sieved yolk and finely chopped white, scattered separately, is a common alternative and looks less heavy against the black roe.
- Temperature and timingAssemble no more than half an hour ahead and keep the filled cups on ice or in the refrigerator. Roe left to sit at room temperature weeps and slackens, and the lemon acid slowly cures the outside of the grains.
Lemon and orange shells used as edible cups were a standard trick of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century hostess, appearing in the same books as tomato cases, cucumber boats and aspic moulds — presentation was doing the work that plating does now, and the shell saved buying yet another set of specialised dishes. Caviar was reaching American tables in quantity in this era, and it is often said that cheap domestic sturgeon from the Delaware, the Hudson and the Great Lakes, fished hard and sold cheaply, had something to do with it; some of that roe was exported to Europe and sold back as Russian. The domestic runs did eventually collapse, and imported roe became the luxury item it remains. A canapé of caviar, lemon and hard-boiled egg is the reduced, cocktail-hour form of the older service of caviar with lemon wedges, chopped egg and onion, made portable for a menu built around cold food and minimum work in a hot kitchen.