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Cheese Canapes
1 cup grated cheese 1/4 teaspoon salt few grains cayenne 6 slices bread Cut bread into circular pieces, sprinkle with a thick layer of grated cheese, season with salt and pepper; place on a baking sheet and bake in oven or under gas flame until cheese is melted. Serve at once. Serves 6.
A five-minute canapé that depends almost entirely on the cheese you choose and on catching it at the right moment. Everything else is assembly.
- Oven or broiler"Under gas flame" means the broiler. Broil 2-3 inches from the element for 2-4 minutes, or bake at 400F for about 8 minutes, until the cheese is just molten and beginning to blister.
- Choose a cheese that melts"grated cheese" in a book of this kind most likely meant a firm American cheese or Cheddar. A well-aged Cheddar can break and weep oil; a young Cheddar, Gruyere or a blend of Cheddar with a little Monterey Jack melts smoothly.
- Salt and pepperThe ingredient list calls for cayenne while the method says pepper. Use the cayenne -- a few grains only -- and go light on the salt, since the cheese is already salty.
- Toast the bread firstUntoasted rounds under a broiler turn soggy beneath the melting cheese. Dry the circles in a 300F oven for a few minutes, or toast one side lightly, before topping.
- Cutting the roundsA 1 1/2 to 2 inch biscuit cutter or a small glass gives two to four rounds from a modern sandwich slice, so six slices yields somewhere between a dozen and two dozen canapes. The book's "serves 6" works out at one slice's worth of bread per person.
- Serve at onceThis is the hinge. Melted cheese on toast sets to rubber within a few minutes of leaving the heat, so bake in batches timed to when they will be handed round.
Cheese canapes belong to the era when the cocktail hour became a fixed part of home entertaining and hostesses needed something hot, cheap and instantly assembled to hand around with drinks. The word canape is French for a couch or sofa, borrowed into cookery for the slice of bread on which a savoury topping sits; American cookbooks of the 1920s and 1930s took up the term for savoury toppings served on small cut rounds of toast. Grated cheese under a flame is a long-standing use of a cheese-end in English and American kitchens -- the same idea as Welsh rabbit -- and the "under gas flame" instruction assumes a broiler in a domestic gas range.