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Brown Bread for Croûtes
Cut the beetroot and brown bread into slices about one-eighth of an inch thick, stamp out some small rounds with a fancy cutter about one inch in diameter; put a layer of anchovy fillets on each. Prepare the following mixture:--One dessertspoonful of capers, one of gherkin, two of chives, all chopped finely and mixed with a teaspoonful of anchovy paste and a few drops of Chilli vinegar.
Spread this mixture over the rounds carefully. Cut the eggs in thin slices, put one slice on each round, mix a little cayenne with salt and sprinkle over the surface. Dish up, and garnish with parsley.
A cold anchovy canapé, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: the recipe assumes the ingredient list has already been read out and that the eggs are hard-boiled. A few gaps need filling before you can work from it.
- What is missingNo quantities are given for bread, beetroot, anchovy fillets or eggs, and the eggs are nowhere told to be cooked. Read them as hard-boiled and shelled, and the beetroot as cooked and peeled — raw beetroot would be inedible in a cold canapé like this.
- DessertspoonfulA dessertspoon is two teaspoons, or about 10 ml, so the filling comes to roughly 2 tsp capers, 2 tsp gherkin and 4 tsp chives bound with 1 tsp anchovy paste.
- Chilli vinegarA Victorian storecupboard staple: vinegar steeped with dried chillies, sold bottled or made at home. Any hot pepper vinegar works, or cider vinegar with a drop of hot sauce. It is there for sharpness as much as heat, so a few drops really is the dose.
- The breadBrown bread here is likely a fairly close-textured brown or wholemeal loaf rather than a soft sandwich slice. A day-old loaf stamps far more cleanly; chilling it firm first helps the cutter cut rather than crush.
- The hinge: keep it dryBeetroot bleeds and eggs weep. Pat every cut round dry before assembling, and build no more than an hour ahead or the bread turns pink and sodden underneath.
- SaltAnchovy fillets, anchovy paste and capers are all heavily salted. Taste the caper mixture before adding any of the cayenne-and-salt sprinkle; you may want cayenne alone.
- Yield and serviceOne-inch rounds mean canapé, not first course — count four to six per person. Serve cold, on a flat dish, parsley in small sprigs rather than a bed.
Croûtes of this kind belong to the savoury, the small sharp mouthful that closed a formal British dinner after the sweets and before dessert — a course that had no equivalent in French service. Anchovy was its dominant flavour: anchovy paste, anchovy essence and bottled fillets were in every well-stocked late-Victorian larder, which is why a cold bread-and-egg canapé counts as a fish dish at all. The alternating discs of dark bread and crimson beetroot, each capped with a pale slice of egg, show the period's taste for colour worked out in miniature on a silver dish, stamped out with a fancy cutter.