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Caviare Sandwich Rolls
To each two tablespoonfuls of caviare add ten drops of onion juice and a few drops of lemon juice,
A seasoning formula rather than a full method — the book assumes you know that the dressed caviare goes onto crustless bread, rolled and chilled. Two tablespoons is enough for roughly six to eight small rolls.
- Onion juiceNot chopped onion: the juice pressed from a cut onion, obtained by scraping the cut face with a spoon or grating half an onion and squeezing the pulp through a sieve. Ten drops is about an eighth of a teaspoon, and it is meant to be barely perceptible.
- Don't salt itCaviare is already heavily salted, and older packs were often salted more heavily than most jars sold today. Taste before adding anything beyond the lemon.
- MixingFold with a fork or a rubber spatula, never beat. Broken eggs turn the mixture to grey paste and lose the point of the ingredient.
- The rollsCut fresh, close-grained white bread in very thin slices, trim the crusts, spread thinly with softened butter, then the caviare, roll tightly, and chill wrapped in a damp cloth or plastic so they hold their shape. Slightly stale bread cracks; day-fresh rolls best.
- Butter firstA thin film of butter on the bread keeps the moisture in the roe from soaking through and softening the roll — worth doing even if the original does not say so.
- What "caviare" meantIn 1900 this generally meant salted sturgeon roe, often domestic American sturgeon and inexpensive. Modern lumpfish or paddlefish roe stands in perfectly well here; a spoonful of a fine imported osetra would be wasted on bread and onion juice.
- ServingMake no more than a few hours ahead, keep cold, and cut each roll in two on the diagonal at the last moment. These are a cocktail or tea sandwich.
Caviare sandwiches turn up constantly in American cookery around 1900, and their frequency says something that is easy to forget: sturgeon roe was then a domestic, comparatively cheap commodity. Sturgeon were taken in quantity from the Delaware, the Hudson and the Columbia, and American caviare was exported to Europe as well as eaten at home in saloons and hotel bars, where salty food and beer sold each other. Overfishing collapsed those runs within a generation, and the price history reversed entirely. The rolled sandwich itself belongs to the same moment of chafing-dish and tea-table cookery, where the aim was a small, cold, handsome thing that could be prepared in advance and passed on a plate. The onion and lemon here are doing what they always do with cured roe: cutting salt and holding back any fishiness, in doses small enough that no one names them.