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Anchovy Canapes
6 portions prepared bread 3 tablespoons anchovy paste 3 teaspoons lemon-juice 2 hard-cooked eggs Garnish of whole anchovies (may be omitted) Anchovies are small fish which are salted and preserved. Anchovy paste, which comes in tubes, jars or bottles, may be utilized, or whole anchovies may be reduced to a smooth paste with a wooden spoon. Season with lemon-juice and spread the paste on the prepared pieces of bread. Split two anchovies lengthwise and lay them diagonally across the canape, marking the point where they cross by a little pyramid of riced yolk of hard-cooked eggs. Petal-shaped pieces of the hard-cooked white may radiate from this center pyramid. The anchovies may be omitted in the decoration. A large anchovy curved around a circle of hard-cooked egg in the center of a canape is also effective.
A cold spread on toast bases, assembled rather than cooked. The only real decisions are the bread and how hard you push the lemon.
- "Prepared bread"In books of this period this usually means firm white bread, crusts trimmed, cut into small rounds, diamonds or strips, and either oven-dried, toasted, or fried pale gold in butter. Fry or toast the bases and cool them completely before spreading, or the paste soaks in and the canape goes limp.
- Anchovy paste in tubesStill sold, and still very salty; modern tubed anchovy paste is close to what is meant. If you use whole fillets instead, drain and blot the oil, then mash smooth with a fork or pound in a mortar rather than a wooden spoon. Three tablespoons is about what a small tin of fillets yields once drained and mashed, though this varies a good deal.
- Salt and butterAdd no salt at any stage. Creaming the paste with an equal volume of soft unsalted butter tempers the salt and helps it spread without tearing the toast.
- Lemon-juiceThree teaspoons to three tablespoons of paste is a sharp ratio. Start with two, taste, and add the third only if the paste is very dense and salty.
- Riced yolkPush the cooked yolks through a fine sieve or a ricer while still slightly warm; cold yolks tend to crumble into pellets rather than fluff. Rice them shortly before serving, as sieved yolk dries out and dulls on standing.
- Timing and yieldSix canapés, so one round each for six people as part of a spread. Assemble no more than about half an hour before serving and keep covered and chilled; both the toast and the egg garnish suffer from waiting.
Anchovy on toast has a long history in English cooking as a savoury-course item, and the small cold canape is a related later form: the same salt fish and butter, but cut small, served cold and standing up before dinner rather than sitting down after it. Potted and tubed anchovy pastes -- Patum Peperium, sold as "the Original Gentleman's Relish," among many others -- made the flavouring a pantry item. The elaborate garnishing with sieved yolk and cut-out petals of white belongs to the same period impulse that produced piped aspic and radish roses, in which the appearance of a cold dish was the cook's chief opportunity to show skill.