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Hors D'œuvres
Arrange on a compartment dish a variety of hors d'œuvres. (a) Thin slices of rye bread, cut in small fancy shapes and spread with sardine paste. (b) Stuffed olives, cut in slices and put on rounds of thin buttered white bread. (c) Have a piece of smoked salmon cut thin and crosswise of the fish so it will roll, shape it into tiny cornucopias, fill with caviar that has been mixed with a little lemon juice; arrange on thin slices of bread. (d) Split water crackers and spread with a mixture of anchovy paste, roquefort cheese, cream, pepper and butter. Garnish with tiny rounds of pickle. (e) Large queen olives split and pitted, the cavity filled with cream cheese and sprinkled with chopped nuts. (f) Potato chips spread with roquefort cheese paste.
This is an assembly job rather than a cooking one, and it stands or falls on timing: everything here is bread, cracker or chip under a wet topping, so nothing should be spread more than about half an hour before it goes out.
- The compartment dishA partitioned platter, roughly a lazy-Susan tray without the spin. Any large board or tray with small bowls or a few folded napkin dividers does the same work; the point is keeping six strong flavours — anchovy, roquefort, caviar, pickle — from bleeding into one another.
- Sardine and anchovy pasteBoth were sold in tubes and small tins and still are, usually in the tinned-fish aisle or an Italian grocer. If you can't find sardine paste, mash drained oil-packed sardines with softened butter and a squeeze of lemon to a spreadable paste, about two parts fish to one part butter.
- Water crackers"Split" means the old thick water biscuit could be prised into two thinner halves, giving a rough inner face that holds a spread. Modern water crackers are already thin and will shatter if you try; use them whole.
- Cutting the salmonThe instruction to slice thin and crosswise is the hinge of item (c). Salmon sliced lengthwise along the fillet, the usual way, lies flat and resists rolling; a crosswise slice curls willingly into a cornucopia. Ask the counter to do it, or use pre-sliced cold-smoked salmon and roll it around a small cone of parchment to set the shape.
- Caviar and lemonLemon juice left to sit on the eggs is generally reckoned to firm and dull them, so mix it in at the last moment; use a bone, horn or plastic spoon rather than metal, which is traditionally said to taint the flavour.
- Roquefort pasteNo quantities are given for (d). A workable ratio is 2 oz roquefort to 1 oz softened butter, a tablespoon of cream, and anchovy paste to taste — start with half a teaspoon, as it is very salty. Beat until smooth; season with pepper only, as the cheese and anchovy bring plenty of salt.
- Potato chipsItem (f) goes soft fast. Spread these last, within ten minutes of serving, and use thick kettle-style chips rather than thin ones. Warming the chips briefly in a 300F oven and cooling them first drives off any staleness.
- Queen olivesLarge green Spanish olives, sold pitted or unpitted; buy them unpitted if you can, as split-and-pitted halves hold the cream cheese better than a machine-cored olive. Pipe the cheese in with a small bag for neatness.
- YieldRead as drinks food rather than a seated course, six varieties at four to six pieces each will serve eight to ten people; the original itself specifies neither.
Hors d'œuvre means literally "outside the work" — food served apart from the main structure of a meal — and the elaborate multi-compartment spread is often traced to Russian zakuski, the table of salted, smoked and pickled things set out before dinner, said to have been absorbed by French and then American kitchens over the nineteenth century. What dates this particular menu is its assumptions: that a household keeps caviar, smoked salmon, roquefort and anchovy paste on hand, and owns a partitioned platter designed for nothing else. Compartment dishes belong to the decades when the cocktail hour became a fixed domestic ritual in America and hostesses needed something that let one person feed a room without leaving the room. The potato chip appearing in item (f), beside caviar in item (c), points to American rather than European entertaining — a homely snack promoted straight into the company china. The two together tell you a great deal about the period's idea of ease.