Six Capers
Some round Croûtes (fried).
Pound the paste and pass through a sieve, spread this upon the croûtes flat and smooth; cook the butter and egg lightly, season with salt and pepper, and pour a teaspoonful over each croûte. Serve hot.
This is a savoury written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: the ingredient list it depended on has not travelled with the method, so the cook is expected to supply the quantities. What follows is what the instructions actually assume.
- What "the paste" isThe dish is named for capers, so the paste is presumably a pounded caper mixture, possibly with anchovy or butter, worked smooth in a mortar and forced through a sieve. The original names no ingredients and gives no quantity; any amount, such as a spoonful of drained capers pounded with butter per croûte, is a modern reconstruction rather than anything the text supplies.
- CroûtesRounds of white bread, cut out and fried crisp, then drained on paper. The recipe specifies neither size nor frying fat. Fry them ahead; they must be dry and firm or the paste will soften them.
- "Cook the butter and egg lightly"This is buttered egg — soft scrambled egg, roughly one egg to 1/2 oz (1 tablespoon) butter, stirred over low heat and pulled off while still loose and pourable. If it sets firm it will not pour by the teaspoonful, which is the point of the dish.
- Order of workHave the croûtes spread and warming, then make the egg last and serve at once. Buttered egg continues to cook in its own heat and goes granular within a minute or two off the stove.
- SeasoningCapers and anchovy are both salty. Season the egg, taste the paste before you salt it at all, and be generous with pepper — the savoury course was meant to be sharp and stimulating rather than bland.
- ServingServed hot, immediately after the sweet and before dessert. Two or three per person makes a reasonable modern canapé.
The savoury was a peculiarly British course: a small, hot, salty mouthful served near the end of a formal dinner, after the sweet, and often on a fried or toasted base of bread so it could be eaten in a bite or two. Anchovy, cheese, marrow, roe and capers all appear in this role in late Victorian and Edwardian professional cookery books, where the point was to leave the palate sharp rather than sugared. Capers themselves are the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub; they reached British kitchens as an imported store-cupboard pickle and were valued precisely because a jar kept indefinitely and delivered acid and salt at once. The extreme brevity of this entry is typical of the genre — books of "high class" recipes were written for cooks who already knew how to cut and fry a croûte and how to butter an egg, and needed only to be told the combination.