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Cheese and Olive Canapés
6 portions prepared bread
Garnish of red pepper or
3 tablespoons cream cheese pickled beet
Olives stuffed with pimientos
Spread on the prepared bread a paste made by mixing equal proportions of cream cheese and chopped stuffed olives. Garnish with a quarter-inch border of the chopped olives and a star of red pepper or pickled beet in the center of each.
The text has been scrambled by column-by-column transcription: the ingredient list ran in two narrow columns and has been interleaved with itself. Read it as six portions of prepared bread, 3 tablespoons cream cheese, pimiento-stuffed olives, and a garnish of red pepper or pickled beet.
- "Prepared bread""Prepared bread" in appetizer recipes of this kind generally means bread cut thin, trimmed of crust, stamped into rounds, squares or diamonds, and either lightly toasted or crisped in butter; check the book's own directions for the term. Untoasted bread is liable to go limp under the cheese paste.
- The quantities contradict each otherThe amounts are incomplete rather than contradictory -- three tablespoons of cream cheese is stated, but no quantity is given for the olives, while the method calls for equal proportions of the two plus more chopped olives for the borders. Figure on about 3 tablespoons each of cheese and finely chopped olives for six, and chop extra for the edging.
- Cream cheese then and nowThe cream cheese of the period was sold fresh in small foil-wrapped blocks and was softer and more perishable than today's stabilized product. Modern block cheese needs to come fully to room temperature, and a teaspoon of cream or milk beaten in will bring it to a spreadable paste.
- Dry the olivesThis is the hinge. Chopped olives carry a surprising amount of brine; drain them, then blot on paper towel before mixing, or the paste will slacken and weep pink brine into the bread.
- Chop fineThe border is only a quarter-inch wide, so the olives must be cut small enough to sit in an even line. Chop by hand rather than in a processor, which turns pimiento-stuffed olives to a wet purée.
- The red pepper garnish"Red pepper" here means a sweet pepper or canned pimiento cut into a star, not cayenne. Pickled beet is the stated alternative and gives a sharper colour; cut both with a small aspic cutter or the tip of a paring knife.
- Yield and timingThe recipe is written for six portions; how many individual pieces that comes to depends on how the bread is cut. Assemble shortly before serving and keep them covered and cool.
Canapé is the French word for a couch or sofa, applied in cookery to the piece of bread that a savoury topping sits on — the same root as the English "canopy." The little garnished bread appears in American household books as the appetizer course made its way from restaurant service into home entertaining in the first decades of the twentieth century, and Butterick, a pattern company publishing for the ambitious middle-class housewife, treated it as a skill worth teaching alongside cutting a bodice. Cream cheese and chopped olive was one of the era's workhorse combinations, spread on canapés, rolled into sandwiches for bridge luncheons and packed into celery ribs; both components were newly convenient, since Philadelphia-style cream cheese was widely distributed by then and Spanish olives stuffed with pimiento came ready-prepared in jars. The insistence on a measured quarter-inch border and a cut star in the exact centre is characteristic of the period's appetite for geometric, decorative food that could be produced in quantity by one pair of hands.