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Caviar Sandwiches
Remove the crusts from thin slices of bread; spread with caviar mixed with lemon juice; roll each slice and fasten with a toothpick or serve flat as usual.
A two-line assembly recipe that depends entirely on the quality of three things: the bread, the roe, and how thin you cut them. A few notes on making rolled sandwiches that stay rolled.
- The hinge: the bread must be fresh and rolled flatDay-old bread cracks when you roll it. Use a soft sandwich loaf the day it is baked, cut about 1/8 inch thick, and press each crustless slice with a rolling pin before spreading. Flattened bread rolls without splitting and holds its shape as it chills.
- What "caviar" means hereIn an early twentieth-century American household book this would generally be salted sturgeon roe, sold in tins and often fairly firm and heavily salted rather than the delicate fresh-packed grades sold now. If you use a lightly salted modern caviar, taste before adding lemon; the acid will read much sharper against it.
- Lemon juice, sparinglyNo quantity is given at all. Start with about 1/2 teaspoon of juice per 2 ounces of caviar and stir gently with a fork or a non-metal spoon. Too much liquid makes the spread weep into the bread.
- Butter the bread firstNot in the original, but a very thin film of softened butter on each slice keeps the bread from turning grey and soggy within the hour. Do this if the sandwiches are being made ahead.
- Avoid metalCaviar is traditionally handled and served with non-metal implements -- wood, horn, bone, glass or plastic -- on the grounds that silver imparts a metallic taste.
- Chill before servingRoll, secure with toothpicks, wrap the whole tray snugly and refrigerate 30 minutes to an hour. The rolls set and you can pull the picks at serving time if the shape holds.
- YieldA 2-ounce tin spreads roughly 8 to 10 thin slices, which gives 8 to 10 rolls or, cut flat into fingers, two to three dozen small pieces for a tea table.
Rolled and ribbon sandwiches were a fixture of the American afternoon tea and reception table in the early twentieth century, and caviar sat squarely inside that world of small, cold, showy food eaten standing up. It was also considerably less exotic then than the word suggests now: sturgeon from the Delaware, the Hudson and the Great Lakes supported a large domestic roe industry in the late nineteenth century, and salted American caviar was cheap enough to appear in ordinary household manuals, and by often-repeated tradition in saloons as well. Overfishing and river pollution collapsed those runs, and sturgeon are now among the most heavily protected fish in the world, with international trade restricted and the roe priced accordingly. A recipe that once treated caviar as a pantry tin now reads as a luxury, which says more about the fishery than about the cookbook.