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Sardine Canapé
Cut rye bread into slices quarter of an inch thick and then cut into fancy shapes, spread with butter and then with sardine paste, decorate with strips of pimento.
A cold assembly recipe with no cooking, so the only variables are the bread, the spread and how long the finished pieces sit before serving.
- Sardine pasteCommercial sardine paste in tubes and small tins was a standard pantry item when this was written and is now hard to find outside specialty shops. Drain a tin of sardines in oil, lift out the backbones if they bother you, and mash to a smooth paste with an equal weight of softened butter plus lemon juice and a little cayenne.
- PimentoPimento here means canned or jarred sweet red pepper, commonly sold in flat tins at the time. Jarred roasted red pepper is the same thing; blot it dry on paper towel before cutting into strips or the moisture will bleed into the paste.
- Butter the bread first, and mean itThe layer of butter is not seasoning, it is a seal. Spread it right to the cut edges so the oily paste and the damp pimento cannot soak the crumb, which is what keeps the finished canapé from going soggy.
- Cutting the shapesQuarter-inch slices of a firm, close-grained dark rye cut cleanly with small aspic or cookie cutters; an open, holey artisan loaf will tear. Chilling the loaf briefly, or using a day-old loaf, makes the cutting much tidier.
- If you want them crispThe original does not toast the bread. For a firmer base, dry the cut shapes in a 300F oven for eight to ten minutes and cool them completely before spreading.
- Yield and holdingA standard sandwich loaf of rye gives roughly 40 to 50 small shapes; a tin of sardines with butter will cover about two dozen. Assemble no more than an hour ahead, cover with plastic wrap over a damp paper towel, and refrigerate.
Canapés of this sort belong to the era when a tin opener did much of the work at a cocktail party: sardine, anchovy and shrimp pastes were sold ready-made, and the cook's contribution was the cutting, the butter and the garnish. The word canapé is French for a sofa or couch, and the usual explanation of the culinary sense is that the bread is the seat on which the savoury topping sits. American entertaining manuals of the 1920s and 1930s treated the form largely as an exercise in shape and colour contrast, hence the fancy shapes and the strip of red pimento.