Home › Entertaining › Cheese Canapés
Cheese Canapés
1 cup grated cheese 1 teaspoon salt Dash of red pepper 6 slices buttered bread Cut the bread into circles, diamonds or squares, butter them lightly and brown by placing in the oven or frying in deep fat. Cover each with a thick layer of the grated cheese to which the seasoning has been added. Bake in the oven until the cheese is thoroughly melted and serve at once.
A straightforward hot canapé that needs only two clarifications: the oven is never given a temperature, and the salt is far more than a modern palate wants.
- Cut back the saltA teaspoon of salt for one cup of grated cheese is heavy even by 1900 standards, and period cheese was not necessarily saltier than ours. A quarter teaspoon is plenty with a firm aged cheddar; taste the cheese first and you may want none at all.
- Which cheese"Grated cheese" in a book of this era usually means a dry, sharp American or English cheddar of the kind sold in wheels for grating, though period canapé recipes also call for Parmesan. Any well-aged cheddar works; avoid pre-shredded cheese, which is dusted with anti-caking starch and melts badly.
- Oven temperatureFor toasting the bread rounds, 375F for 8-10 minutes, turning once. For the final melt, 400F for 4-6 minutes, or run them under a broiler for about 2 minutes and watch them the whole time.
- "Red pepper"This is cayenne, not paprika and not crushed chile flakes. A dash means the amount that comes out of the shaker in one shake — roughly an eighth of a teaspoon for the full batch.
- Butter twice, or onceThe ingredient list calls for buttered bread and the method then says to butter the cut shapes lightly, so the instruction is duplicated. Butter the cut shapes on both sides before toasting and stop there; more butter under the cheese will pool.
- Deep frying the basesFrying gives a richer, sturdier base than the oven. Fat at 360-375F, a few pieces at a time, about 30 seconds a side, then drain on paper before topping.
- Yield and timingSix slices of sandwich bread yield about 18 two-inch rounds, or 24 smaller diamonds — enough for six to eight people alongside other things. "Serve at once" is literal: the cheese sets and the base softens within a few minutes.
Canapé is simply the French word for a sofa or couch, borrowed into cookery for a small piece of bread that something sits on, and it had passed into English in American entertaining books. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format — pages that could be pulled out and rearranged — seems to have been aimed at the housekeeper assembling her own working collection, and the Entertaining section of such books often included things that could be cut, topped and finished in a hot oven at the last minute. Cheese canapés belong to the same family as Welsh rarebit and cheese straws, all of them ways of turning a hard grating cheese and a little cayenne into something warm and salty to hand round before a meal. The pepper is not decorative: sharp cheese and cayenne was a recognised savoury pairing of the period.