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Asparagus in Canapés
Prepare canapés by cutting stale bread into two and one-half-inch cubes. Remove a two-inch cube from the side, forming a square receptacle. Toast in oven until evenly browned. Place a few asparagus tips in canapé and fill with cream sauce or cream tomato sauce.
A bread case filled with asparagus and sauce, written for cooks who already knew how to make a white sauce. Two things need attention: the geometry of the cube, and the fact that no sauce recipe is given.
- "Canapé" here means a case, not a crackerIn this period a canapé could be a hollowed cube of bread — what a French kitchen would call a croustade. It is a container to be filled, served on a plate with a fork, not a one-bite topped round.
- Check the arithmetic before you cutA two-inch cavity in a two-and-a-half-inch cube leaves walls a quarter-inch thick, which will collapse under hot sauce. Cut the cavity closer to one and a half inches, leaving a half-inch wall and a solid base.
- Bread choice matters more than stalenessA close-crumbed white sandwich loaf, unsliced and a day or two old, cuts cleanly. Fresh bread tears and open, airy artisan crumb leaks sauce through the walls.
- Oven temperatureThe original says only "toast in oven." Use 350F for 10 to 15 minutes, turning the cubes so all faces colour. Brushing the outside and cavity with melted butter first gives a crisper, more waterproof case.
- The sauce is assumed knowledgeA period cream sauce is a thin béchamel: one tablespoon each butter and flour cooked together, then a cup of milk, seasoned with salt, pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. "Cream tomato sauce" is the same with strained tomato purée stirred in at the end, off the heat, to avoid curdling.
- Asparagus tipsCook the tips separately in salted water until just tender — three to five minutes for thin spears — and drain well. Any water clinging to them will thin the sauce and soften the bread.
- Assemble at the last minuteFill the cases as they go to the table. Ten minutes of standing turns a crisp croustade into a wet one.
- YieldTwo cases per person makes a luncheon dish; one makes a first course. A large unsliced loaf will not yield many cubes of this size once the crusts are trimmed, so count them before you plan the numbers.
Wartime and vegetarian cookbooks of the early twentieth century made much of dishes like this one, in which the milk, butter and flour supplied the richness and calories that a meat course would otherwise have provided, while the asparagus supplied the sense of occasion. Asparagus was still a genuinely seasonal luxury, so a few tips could be made to furnish a whole course when set in a bread case and napped with sauce. The bread case itself is the frugal cousin of the pastry vol-au-vent: stale bread cost nothing, needed no fat-heavy pastry, and put the scrap ends of the loaf to work. The word canapé is French for couch or sofa, a name usually explained by the idea of a garnish seated on a base of bread — the modern narrow sense of a small cold hors d'oeuvre had not yet crowded out the older, roomier one.