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Eggs (To the boiling-point dust)
to the boiling-point, dust the eggs with salt and pepper, pour over the sauce, and serve.
Egg Canapés.
Have ready, cooked beforehand, four hard-boiled eggs; cut them carefully into halves lengthwise, remove the yolks, and press them through a small sieve. Soak two anchovies, then dry and remove the bones and chop them with two or three cold cooked mushrooms and half a teaspoonful of capers; mix in the sifted yolks, add a seasoning of salt, pepper and paprica, and one teaspoonful of tarragon vinegar. This work may be done some hours before the time of serving. Have a little oil or clarified butter in the blazer, and sauté in it some rounds of bread-one for each half of an egg.
When the bread is of good color on one side, turn it and place half an egg- the space from which the yolk was taken being filled with the anchovy mixture - on the bread; cover the blazer, and, when the second side of the bread is browned nicely and the egg hot, serve at once.
The page opens mid-sentence — the tail of a preceding egg dish — and then gives a complete recipe for egg canapés built in the pan of a chafing dish. It is a straightforward stuffed-egg-on-fried-bread, and most of what needs translating is equipment and one long-vanished ingredient form.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper, direct-heat pan of a chafing dish, essentially a shallow skillet with a lid. Any 10-inch frying pan with a cover does the same job over a low burner.
- AnchoviesThe recipe assumes whole salt-packed anchovies, which is why they are soaked, dried and boned. Two salt anchovies rinsed and filleted equal roughly four oil-packed fillets; if using oil-packed, skip the soaking and cut back on the added salt.
- PapricaSimply paprika. In cookbooks of this period it generally meant the mild sweet sort, used as much for color as heat — not smoked paprika, which will overwhelm the anchovy.
- Cold cooked mushroomsTwo or three leftover cooked mushrooms, chopped fine. Fresh raw mushrooms will weep and loosen the filling; cook and cool them first if you have none on hand.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth seeking out — it carries the anchovy in a way plain white vinegar does not. A teaspoon of white wine vinegar with a pinch of dried tarragon steeped in it is a reasonable substitute.
- Cut the bread to fitStamp the rounds with a cutter about the width of half an egg, roughly 2 inches. Too large and the egg slides; too small and the filling ends up on the pan.
- The hinge: gentle second sideOnce the egg goes on, the lid traps steam and warms it through. Keep the heat low. Hard-boiled white held over strong heat turns tough and rubbery, and the point is a warm egg on a crisp round, not a cooked-twice one.
- YieldFour eggs give eight canapés — a first course for four, or a plate of appetizers for six alongside other things. The filling can be made hours ahead, as the recipe notes; assemble and fry at the last minute.
Chafing-dish cookery was a genuine fashion in American households around 1900, and this book belongs squarely to it: the spirit lamp and blazer let a hostess cook at the table, a habit often connected with the smaller apartments and thinner domestic staffs of the period. Canapés — conventionally derived from the French for a couch or sofa, the bread being the seat on which the garnish sits — arrived with the same wave of Frenchified entertaining, and the anchovy-and-caper filling here recalls the savory course of the English and French table. The recipe calls for salt-packed anchovies to be soaked and boned; the small flat tin of oil-packed fillets is a later convenience. That the filling is explicitly made hours in advance tells you how these dishes were meant to work: all the knife work done quietly beforehand, and only the theatrical part performed in front of the guests.