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Caviare Sandwiches
Mix three tablespoons lemon juice, three tablespoons olive oil, and one quarter pound Russian caviare. Beat until creamy. Spread between thin slices of bread.
A three-ingredient spread that lives or dies on the caviar and the restraint with which you dress it. The proportions in the original are generous with acid and oil; taste as you go.
- Quantity and yieldA quarter pound is 4 oz, about 115 g — a substantial amount of roe. With the lemon and oil beaten in you get somewhere around a cup of spread; how many tea sandwiches that makes depends on how thickly you spread it.
- "Russian caviare" todayIn 1907 this would have meant salted sturgeon roe; pressed (payusnaya) caviar was common alongside the fragile large-grain malossol sold now, and the original does not say which is wanted. Pressed caviar, lumpfish or paddlefish roe, or salmon keta all beat to a paste willingly; fine osetra or beluga is arguably wasted here, since beating destroys the grain that makes it worth the price.
- Beat, but not to deathThe point is an emulsion of oil, lemon and roe, not a purée. A fork or a whisk by hand for a minute is enough; a food processor is likely to break the eggs down into a dull, uniform paste.
- Adjust the acidThree tablespoons each of lemon and oil to 4 oz of roe is a loose, sharp mixture by modern taste. Start with half of each, beat, and add the rest only if the paste is stiffer than you want to spread.
- No saltCaviar of any grade is already cured with salt, and pressed caviar heavily so. The recipe adds none for good reason — do not correct it.
- The bread"Thin slices" is not defined in the original; a firm white sandwich loaf sliced thin, crusts trimmed, suits it. Butter the bread lightly first if you are making these ahead, or the oil in the spread may soak through.
- ServingCut into fingers or triangles, cover with a damp cloth, and refrigerate; they are best eaten the same day. Held longer, the acid dulls the roe and the bread goes limp.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard — a promotional cookbook of the sort candy and flour companies produced in quantity in that decade, padded out with general recipes well beyond the sponsor's product. Caviar sandwiches turn up in a great many American books of the period, and there was a domestic supply behind them: sturgeon were fished heavily in the Delaware and Hudson through the late nineteenth century, and American roe was salted, pressed and shipped in volume, sometimes to Europe and back with a Russian label attached. "Russian caviare" on an American page of 1907 signalled the pressed, dark, intensely salty style rather than a guarantee of origin.