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Canape Lorenzo
Chop a small shallot, fry lightly in two ounces of butter, without coloring.
Add a tablespoon of flour wet with a pint of cream, then one pint of crab meat; salt and pepper to taste and leave on the fire till it bubbles. Cut slices of bread one-quarter of an inch thick, trim in any desired shape and toast on one side only.
Put the mixture on the toasted side and cover one-eighth of an inch thick with butter prepared as follows: Onequarter of a pound of butter, one-half a pound of grated Parmesan cheese and a seasoning of both red and white pepper.
Lay the canapes on a buttered dish and color in the oven.
A hot crab canapé finished under a blanket of Parmesan butter. The recipe reads loosely by modern standards, and the sauce thickening is where it goes wrong if taken literally.
- The sauce must be thick, not pourableOne tablespoon of flour to a pint (2 cups) of cream will not hold anything on a piece of toast. Aim for a thick binding sauce — roughly 3 tablespoons flour to 1 cup cream — or reduce the original mixture hard until it mounds on a spoon. The recipe gives only "leave on the fire till it bubbles," so judge the consistency yourself before it leaves the pan.
- Quantities and scaleA pint is 2 cups; a pint of picked crab meat runs roughly 12 to 16 oz. As written this makes a party-sized quantity of small canapés; halve everything for a household supper.
- Toast one side onlyFollow the direction as given; the recipe does not say why, and the mixture goes onto the toasted face. Use a firm white loaf cut a scant 1/4 inch.
- The Parmesan butterHalf a pound of grated Parmesan to a quarter pound of butter makes a stiff paste, not a spread; cream the butter fully, work the cheese in, and press it on with a spatula rather than trying to spread it. If it will not go on, add butter a spoonful at a time.
- Red and white pepper"Red pepper" here is cayenne — a pinch or two is plenty against the crab. White pepper was preferred for pale mixtures so no black specks showed; black pepper works and only costs you the look.
- "Color in the oven"This means brown the top, quickly. A broiler two to three inches from the element for 1 to 2 minutes does it, or a very hot oven at 475F for 4 to 5 minutes. Watch continuously — the cheese butter goes from gold to burnt fast.
- Crab meatUse cooked lump or backfin crab and pick it over for cartilage and shell fragments before it goes into the sauce. Canned pasteurized crab should be drained well or the sauce loosens.
- ServingThese are made to be eaten hot within minutes of leaving the oven. The crab mixture can be cooked and chilled a day ahead and the cheese butter kept covered in the refrigerator; assemble and brown at the last moment.
Canapé Lorenzo belongs to the era when the formal American dinner opened with something small, hot and savory on toast, and when the model for that cooking was the French-trained kitchen of the great New York restaurants. Dishes labeled "Lorenzo" — the crab-and-Parmesan canapé chief among them — are generally traced to Delmonico's and are usually said to honor Lorenzo Delmonico, who ran the house through its mid-nineteenth-century heyday; the attribution is traditional rather than documented. What makes the recipe worth reading is the method, which is pure restaurant practice transplanted into a domestic cookbook: a shallot sweated without color, a cream sauce bound with flour, and a compound cheese butter used as a glazing layer to be browned at the last second.