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Fish Canapé
To half a cup of flaked canned tuna fish, add a chopped hard-boiled egg, a chopped cucumber pickle, a tablespoonful of diced celery, a teaspoonful of minced onion and two tablespoonfuls of mayonnaise. Mix well and spread on rounds of nut bread that have been cut in four pie-shaped sections. Serve as a first course for supper. May also be used as a sandwich filling.
A straightforward tuna salad on nut bread, sized for a first course rather than a lunch plate. A few of the proportions and terms need translating.
- YieldHalf a cup of flaked tuna is roughly one 5 oz can, drained. With the egg and vegetables the mixture comes to about a cup and a quarter, enough for 16 to 20 small wedges — four to six people as a first course.
- Cucumber pickleThis appears to mean a whole small pickled cucumber rather than relish; the recipe does not say whether sweet or sour, and either was common. Chop it fine and blot it dry, or the moisture will loosen the mayonnaise and soak the bread.
- Canned tuna then and nowMid-century canned tuna was almost always packed in oil, which gave the filling body and richness. Water-packed tuna is drier; drain it well and add a little extra mayonnaise or a spoonful of olive oil to compensate.
- Nut breadA quick bread with chopped walnuts or pecans, faintly sweet, baked in a loaf pan and sliced thin. Rounds are cut from the slices with a biscuit cutter, then quartered. Any dense, slightly sweet quick bread works; a sturdy whole-wheat sandwich loaf is the plainest substitute.
- Assemble lateMayonnaise on quick bread goes soggy within the hour. Mix the filling ahead and keep it cold, but cut and spread the bread no more than 20 minutes before serving.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Canned tuna, pickle and mayonnaise carry salt, but the mixture wants black pepper and a squeeze of lemon to lift it.
Canapefore canned tuna moved from novelty to pantry staple in American kitchens — West Coast canneries had been packing albacore since the century's early decades, and by the 1930s and 40s tuna salad was standard household fare. What marks this as a party recipe rather than a lunchbox one is the presentation: bread cut into rounds and then into pie-shaped wedges. The pairing of a savoury fish salad with sweet nut bread turns up elsewhere in the era's entertaining books. The instruction that the same mixture "may also be used as a sandwich filling" is the honest note in the entry: the difference between a canapefore and a sandwich here is entirely a matter of how the bread is cut.