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Sandwiches, Caviare
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-6 rounds of very thin brown bread-and-butter, lemonjuice, caviare, Nepaul pepper. AVERAGE Cost, 1s.
Spread some caviare on three of the rounds, squeeze over a very little lemonjuice, and season with the pepper; then put over the other slices, and, after cutting off the crust, cut into fingers. Put a stamped paper upon the dish, arrange the fingers in layers, grotto form, and put in the centre and round a garnish of water cress.
A late-Victorian savoury sandwich, assembled rather than cooked. Almost nothing here needs updating except the vocabulary and the shopping.
- Nepaul pepperA Victorian name for a ground red pepper associated with the Nepal region, sold by British grocers alongside cayenne; period sources disagree over whether it was hotter or milder. Cayenne is the usual modern substitute, and it should be used sparingly — a few grains only, since caviare is already salty and assertive.
- Stamped paperA pierced or cut-out paper doily laid on the serving dish, purely decorative and standard practice for cold savouries. Any lace paper doily does the job, or omit it.
- "Grotto form"The fingers are stacked in receding layers so the pile suggests a little cave or cairn; the recipe sets watercress in the centre of the dish and around it. It is a presentation instruction, not a technique.
- Brown bread-and-butterA wholemeal loaf, cut as thin as the knife allows. Buttering the cut face of the loaf before slicing is one way of getting slices this thin without tearing. Butter should be soft, not melted.
- Which caviareThe caviare meant would have been tinned or jarred sturgeon roe, then a luxury but not the rarity it is now. Farmed sturgeon caviare, salmon keta or lumpfish roe all work; keep it cold until the moment of spreading. A non-metal spoon is traditionally preferred, metal being said to give roe a tinny taste.
- Lemon juice"A very little" is meant literally. More than a few drops turns the roe watery and the bread damp, and the sandwiches are best cut shortly before they are wanted, before the bread and butter soften.
- YieldSix rounds make three sandwiches, cut into fingers — roughly 12 to 18 pieces, which the book gives as a dish for six.
- CostA shilling was a real outlay for a plate of sandwiches, which is the point: caviare marked the dish as a party savoury, not everyday food.
Caviare sandwiches belong to the savoury course and the ballroom supper table, where small cold items were built to be eaten standing with a glass in the other hand. Mrs Beeton's book, in its later enlarged editions, ran long lists of sandwiches under one heading — anchovy, ham, tongue, cress, caviare — as the sandwich became a mainstay of at-home entertaining. Sturgeon roe reached British kitchens largely in tins from Russia via the Caspian trade, and while it was expensive it was not yet scarce; the twentieth-century collapse of wild sturgeon stocks is what turned this from a plausible shilling's worth into a special-occasion purchase. "Nepaul pepper" is a period marker in itself: the name recurs in nineteenth-century British cookery books and grocery lists and then drops out of use, with cayenne left as the general term.